The Flight of the Maidens

by Jane Gardam

  ‘But then—?’

  ‘No. I didn’t tell anyone. Yes. I did fill them up and send them back. Look. I don’t know why I kept it to myself.’

  He took her to the first of many agencies and they discovered that there had indeed been another Lisa Klein, who was now with relatives in Canada. And Lieselotte herself at last was found. It was Carl who found her, and he went at once to Rillington Mansions to confront her with herself; but Lieselotte was out.

  ‘She’s walking, walking,’ said Mr. Feldman, urging him down the steep steps. ‘Walking, walking.’

  Mrs. Feldman passed him some illegal salami, a very old Marie biscuit and a cup of black tea in a Sèvres teacup. The Polish refugee did not know when he had felt so much at home.

  ‘There is news?’

  ‘Yes. Her parents are dead. This is certain. It will be bad for her, but she must immediately be stopped from hoping. She has never admitted to hope, but she must now not hope. I must do it. But there is, it seems, a great-aunt in California.’

  Mrs. Feldman commented that his face was all atwitch and he replied that it had this habit. She said, ‘I think you have your own story.’

  ‘Hey, hey,’ said Mr. Feldman. ‘I wonder in what age are we living?’

  Carl took Lieselotte the next day to see the College Hetty was coming to, in Regent’s Park, for it was somewhere new to them both. It was a beautiful day, and they walked across green lawns, past tennis courts and through Botanical Gardens. They looked up at the College library. Older students were already there. Serene faces in a row were looking down at books along a line of Georgian windows.

  ‘She’s going to like this,’ said Lieselotte. ‘Oh, she will adore it!’

  They asked to see the students’ rooms, which had just been painted for the new academic year, and there were coal fires laid already by a maid, and polished floors and armchairs and empty bookshelves waiting. One long stretch of rooms looked over a rose-garden. London hummed pleasantly in the distance.

  ‘She can’t grumble,’ said Carl.

  ‘Hetty never grumbles,’ said Lieselotte. ‘She’s of the ecstatic kind.’

  ‘An English girl? Ecstatic?’ he said.

  ‘She’s Hetty,’ said Lieselotte.

  In the rose-garden in the grounds of the College by the lake, he told her what he had discovered and that her family was dead. She said nothing.

  She said nothing. And she said nothing all the way back on the bus. He took her hand for the first time, and lifted it and kissed it. She stroked his face and said, ‘Why is your face twitching so today?’ and kissed his cheek. ‘So she wants me, does she? This aunt? Who is she? I’ve never heard of her. She probably belongs to the other one, the one in Canada.’

  ‘No. She’s yours all right. I’ve made quite sure. She is remarkably rich and I am tempted to ask you to marry me, for she is a widow and she is childless, and she swore an affidavit for you years ago if you should ever turn up.’

  ‘Let’s get out.’

  They left the bus and walked together through Bayswater towards Notting Hill, at first apart, but, soon, holding on to each other tight.

  ‘There’s an enormous queue for the United States,’ she said.

  ‘Not if you’re sponsored. It appears you can just go. You’ll need a visa, of course, and that takes time. There will be plenty of money.’

  ‘I have a visa.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oddly enough. Maybe it was meant for the other one, but I think that it might do. I got one.’

  ‘This is unbelievable! You have a visa?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you go to Cambridge in exactly one month?’

  ‘On the ninth of October,’ she said. ‘I go on.’

  He took both her hands and then kissed them, one after the other. ‘It appears that she is your only living relative in the world. It is her dead husband who was your blood relative. He was a Jew and she is not. She is a little strange, but she wants you.’

  One week later, before she left for California, Lieselotte wrote letters for many hours. The letter to the Stonehouses was the hardest, but she battled through. The need for gratitude fought with an astonishing, nameless distaste. She saw her passive self, sitting on the coal-box with her knitting, all the unbelievable dispassionate years, the absence of curiosity, the rejection of lusts, the acceptance of whatever befell. The thing she saw most clearly was the beauty, the certainty, of the pacifism of the Stonehouses’ religion, the folding of hands as the details of the death camps broke over the sane world. The solemnity and lack of comment after the Belsen film, the determination not to hate, the insistence on passive love.

  ‘I couldn’t be Quaker,’ she said. ‘The silence would extinguish me.’

  ‘You do realise,’ Carl said, ‘that the Quakers did more for us than everybody else? Without them you and I would be dead now. They got thousands out. They were wonderful.’

  But she couldn’t forgive them their forgiveness, and it read as a cold letter to these mystical but practical people. A cold letter from a stranger. She saw them as they passed it across from one to another in the clean and perfect puritan house, the flower vase on the windowsill that held, summer and winter, only one flower. I preferred the High Anglicans, she thought. Hetty’s mother’s gorgeous vicar. I wonder why Hetty so hated him.

  She decided that her letter to Hetty would be next.

  Well, maybe not next. But soon.

  When she had finished ten letters she asked Mr. Feldman if he would post them and left the money for stamps.

  She left the Feldmans no presents, she left no forwarding address. She left Mrs. Feldman ruminating at the work-table over the spurned red plush, and Mr. Feldman walking up and down on the pavement, signalling for a taxi, his arm still raised absent-mindedly, but now in farewell, as she was whirled away. He looked tired, she thought. But she forgot him.

  Away she went, with only two small bags, to join the ship in Southampton that was to cross the Atlantic. She was not travelling steerage, but with a cabin to herself and a wad of money in her purse. The days passed. She was not seasick. She lay watching the waves tipping into swells and points through her cabin’s porthole. Other passengers moaned and heaved and fasted, but Lieselotte ploughed through four colossal meals a day and impressed her steward and the crew. For hours at a time she sat hunched upon the deck like a small, angry-looking otter in Mrs. Feldman’s spiky black coat that trailed about her ankles. It was hot, delicious, salt-sprayed weather, but she wrapped the coat about her. Her tight little mouth that now did not smile was surrounded with a pattern of draw-string lines like somebody old. An otter’s whiskers. She did not read, nor write nor talk to anybody, and completely ignored the fancy-dress parades, the deck-quoits, the swimming pool and the dancing, though once or twice she attended the concerts, sitting at the back with closed eyes. Afterwards she would march about the deck trailing the fur coat that almost extinguished her, and people thought she was unhinged.

  From New York she flew to San Francisco, north first, then south, thrice sitting at airports she had never heard of. She delighted herself by the discovery that she was a natural traveller, finding lounges and ticket booths, documents and flight numbers with ease. Once she sat for six hours looking out of the windows of an airport—maybe Kansas City—over a vast elastic plain. On one hop of the flight she looked down on an underwater landscape, like a waving ocean floor. But these are forests, she thought; hundreds of miles of trees. It was the Fall, and the forests were crimson and yellow, sharp rust and bright gold. On the plane everyone was gazing down and exclaiming, and the pilot announced that he, personally, in all his experience had never seen the Fall so beautiful, and that he would go down a little nearer. Lieselotte sat unsmiling, and watched on.

  On the second flight they came upon a mighty wound. The colours changed. She thought of tiny coloured wag
ons crawling like ants towards the barrier of mountains. Stopping. Making camp. Far enough. Never moving on again. Corn and wine and turkeys and Indians. The Stonehouses had sometimes allowed her to go to the pictures. The world now was beginning to break out into great swathes and peaks. Rivers were flung down in lead and silver loops. And then snow. Snows! ‘The High Chaparral,’ she said aloud, and the person next to her said, ‘That’s right, honey,’ so she turned her black fur shoulder on him and said no more.

  The Pacific Ocean. The ocean of peace.

  The plane swung and dipped and straightened and dropped over hard blue bays and pink and yellow hills. Clusters of towers humped on an island. Building blocks for children. Were these skyscrapers? And now . . . down, down, sway, bump, down they floated over a huge bay towards an island. A glowing bridge with a rose-red rectangle at either end stood in the water, caught together by rose-red threads. Someone had flung handfuls of houses over the hills, away and away, wherever you looked. And all over the water were boats like minnows and newts and water-rats and floating white butterflies. They had landed.

  She clambered off the plane and out into warm air. There was a cheerful, battering wind and unimaginable light.

  In the taxi she handed the driver the address, and found it was thirty miles off. ‘Do we cross the bridge?’

  ‘We cross the bridge. It’ll be a few dollars.’

  ‘I have plenty of money,’ she said. ‘I’ve been sponsored.’

  ‘You been sponsored? Is that a fact? Well, let’s go.’

  Over the bridge for nearly a mile, up and then down, blue, blue, blue on either side, blue of sky and blue below, the red of the bridge leaving an afterglow on the hills. There were streets and streets of light-hearted houses saying, ‘Earthquakes, come and get me.’ When she had told Mr. Feldman where she was to live he had said, ‘I am sure that you have heard of the San Andreas Fault?’ Lieselotte said, ‘I have never been afraid of anything in my life,’ and Mr. Feldman had looked grave and sad. But nobody in America was afraid of anything. Here they were all, in their hundreds and thousands, walking about in the little coloured cardboard towns, idle and happy and talkative.

  Now they drove into the hills and fields. One old horse. An old-style farmhouse, then swoop and dash, up, then down. A port like toytown. Big black leathery birds flying slowly along over the water. Down, down and to a long, long seaside street with all the backs of the houses blank, their hidden fronts turned to the shore, watching the sea. The fare was huge but she felt nothing. She added five dollars for a tip, which he took as a right. I am a natural traveller, she thought again. I know how to do it.

  ‘Good luck, honey,’ he said. ‘Stick around.’

  He left her standing in the road beside her two bags.

  Everywhere looked new. The road was not even properly finished, but every perfect, painted blank wall had its perfect, painted small gate and flight of coloured ceramic steps going down from it and round the side of the house, and out of sight. There were important garage doors on the road-level, all painted white or pale coffee-cream. The windowless backs of the houses had creepers growing on them in stylish patterns, like giant pointed hands. The leaves had been made to sprout at exact intervals, like a patterned plate. Here and there along the silent street was a cistern full of lilies with flowers like leather parrots.

  How quiet it was. She could see that the road had been cut through an ancient wood that had covered the hillside and was still there above her. She could not see the sea below for the houses. No people here. Not a dog. Not a leaf fallen. Not a rubbish bin. Not a bike propped up. Not a yawning cat. And not a wall that did not speak big, big money. But not a breath of exertion, experiment or endeavour.

  She had expected something different. She had expected the ramshackle and outrageous, bogus like Hollywood, gardens full of vulgar statues, jokey fountains playing Coca-Cola. Big-hearted, easygoing, sharp-witted American millionaires, boasting and sleek, confident and guileless, like the GIs had been at the Shields West hops on her very occasional Saturday nights out. There was nothing here but a great hush, and understated design, the sun shining on and on, as if it would never stop. As if it had nowhere else to go.

  At last she picked up the bags and took them one by one down the steep steps. Down there, round the corner of the house, the tiles turned into smoother, paler ones covered in cabalistic signs. There was a thick metal plaque on the wall depicting the awful, irrepressible sun. The door of the house stood sideways to the steps with a blank wall above it. The house must hang halfway down the cliff-side. She rang the bell. There was no sound.

  There was a little balustrade in front of her and she looked down over it and saw the tops of feathery trees, moving a little. Their roots must be far, far below, clamped in the rocks on the shore. She could hear the sea down there now, swishing slowly and softly. There seemed no way into this house, no windows, no second door. She stood with her two cases in the deep shadow of the bastion wall above and wondered what to do.

  The door opened and a woman looked out and said, ‘Oh my! Well, hi! You’ve come. You’re early.’

  Lieselotte stood looking at her, her mouth pinched into the otter’s whiskers.

  ‘Well, great. O.K. Come on in. Come on in and sit down. We’ll not be long.’

  Lieselotte dragged the luggage into a high narrow hallway that opened on to a huge white room flooded with the light from a wall of glass that was filled with the ocean and the sky. In front of this backcloth sat three women, exquisitely painted: eyebrows, lips, nails, lashes. They were playing cards round a glass table and drinking something out of long glasses. Their hair was dark, cut sharp and neat, like metal bathing-caps.

  ‘Just you sit there,’ said the woman who had come to the door. ‘We’ll be with you in no time at all.’

  So Lieselotte sat on a long, low banquette upholstered in white leather. The carpet spread to every corner, deep white wool, like a field of snow. The chairs were white leather and steel. On the white walls were white pictures. The white painted edge to the window left no room for curtains and must have been especially glazed, she thought, for through the glass the vast blue sea did not even whisper. One of the women lit a white cigarette with a gold tip. Another smoked a black cigarette and tapped it out in a blue lapis ashtray. The smoke from the cigarettes twirled up blue against the white walls. The four fans of cards were as immobile as sculpture in their fingers. The women were dressed in navy-blue, magenta and fuschia-pink and all were hung with gold chains. Their ears were blobbed with gold and their faces were lacquered to the smoothness of their helmets of hair. But as she watched she saw that their complexions did not quite disguise the spider-web of lines, like a craze on porcelain. All four women were most immensely old.

  21

  Between Hetty’s eyes and the pages of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, into which she had lasciviously swooped to counteract Thomas Carlyle, there arose every two or three minutes the face of Rupert Fitzurse. It was not so much an image of his features or his stature, for he was rather apologetically stooped. It was, she thought, his regard and sweetness, his kind grace. You felt that he would be exactly the same for everyone—man, woman, child—but at the same time you would be, to him, unique. There was a peaceful animal in him, but an animal, and once he moved away from you, his mind, you knew, would return to its own meridian, its happy world. Oh, that’s what he was. He was happy!

  Yet he was not unworldly. The first sound she had heard from him was the drawing of a cork. He enjoyed wine. He had looked at it and twirled it about in the glass, knocked it back, the bottle swinging from his hand. She’d never seen anyone do that. Actually, she had not before seen anyone drinking wine.

  Love, she thought, that’s it. That’s what he knows about, universal love, and no prudery. He’d be able to love you all in all, and out and out. I want him, she thought, and then, even more astoundingly, And I’ll get him.

&nb
sp; Struggling with Canto I, Book One, she felt herself in Rupert’s arms.

  Wouldn’t Ma die from joy if I brought him home? Just walked in with him: ‘Oh, Ma, this is Rupert.’ Her mother’s shining delighted eyes, her pretty manners. I’d certainly not be ashamed of Ma’s looks either. Blushing bright pink. And saying later to the vicar, ‘She’s met rather a nice man. I believe he is an Honourable. I’m afraid he’s a Roman, but he seems very taken with her.’ Her mother’s voice, always so obsequious to the vicar, would now be strong and confident. ‘Well, of course Malcolm’s family were not exactly nobodies.’

  How would Rupert get on with the grave-digger? Well . . . not so certain here. The grave-digger could be a hard man.

  Rupert reminds me a bit of Christ, she thought, and felt suddenly shocked, and sick.

  The vicar didn’t think her father was a somebody, he thought her father was a dud. He was sure, too, that Hetty took after her father. Any chance the vicar had of seeing her on her own—he didn’t like her, he didn’t find her attractive—he would start on about how she should look into herself, confront her soul’s shortcomings. ‘You’re clever enough, Hester, but spiritually, spiritually, you have work to do.’

  ‘Darling,’ said her mother, ‘I don’t want to butt in, but I have often found Confession a help.’

  Off we go again.

  Hetty had been to Confession once, just after her Confirmation. The vicar had looked pleased with himself all the time and she couldn’t think of anything to say. And once he had farted.

  Then another time, after her O levels, she’d gone into the sitting-room one night, her father out on one of his ramblings, and found the vicar tousling up her mother on the sofa. She had dealt with this burly vision with a sophistication that had astonished everybody. ‘Just looking for a pencil,’ she said, withdrawing from the room.