Losing Nicola

by Susan Moody

  I needed to change the subject. ‘May I look at the books?’ I asked.

  As well as the piano, Mrs Sheffield’s former drawing room possessed a wall of fitted mahogany bookcases, each shelf fringed with gold-tooled leather and filled with the English classics. We had them all at home, but in much worse condition than these beautiful unused volumes of Scott, Dickens, Tolstoy, Kipling, Austen.

  He nodded.

  Hardly breathing, I took down a copy of Nicholas Nickleby and opened it very carefully. It was an India paper edition, with black-and-white etchings that were familiar from the battered copies on our own shelves. I put it back, reached first for Emma, and then for my current favorite, Northanger Abbey. I felt an almost sensuous pleasure in touching these books, opening the covers and seeing how the pages clung one to another, each one edged with gold that glinted in the light from the big bay window.

  ‘Do you read a lot?’ I asked.

  ‘I try,’ he said.

  ‘If you want something different from these, there’s a public library, here.’

  ‘Where is that?’

  For the first time in my life, I knew how it felt to be an adult, in charge, in control. ‘I could show you if you like,’ I said offhandedly, ‘one of these days.’

  ‘I would like very much to do that.’

  ‘They even have a few German books,’ I said. ‘But you’ve probably read them all.’

  ‘They are still there, on the shelves?’ He seemed surprised.

  ‘Of course. Why not?’

  He looked away from me, out to sea, his voice musing. ‘I suppose I had imagined public burnings of German literature, people in coats and scarves turning up to throw their foreign books upon the pyre, hissing perhaps, hanging effigies of Goethe and Rilke, even the Brothers Grimm, fines for those who try to conceal these heretical books produced by the Enemy.’

  I stared at the back of his head, not sure if he was joking. Orlando and I had grown up on Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Why would anyone wish to burn them? But we also knew about brave Martin Luther burning the Papal Bull and we had just read Fahrenheit 451. ‘We don’t do that sort of thing here,’ I said.

  ‘I think not.’ There was a droop to his shoulders that rent me. I picked up a pearl from the decorated bowl which held them. I loved the dull gleam of it lying in my palm, the hint of the life he had abandoned, a life to which he longed – or so I surmised – to return. I put it in my pocket. I started to walk over to stand by him at the window, edging round the piano, when he turned back into the room. Silhouetted against the brightness from the sea, I couldn’t clearly see his features. Had he seen me? My face reddened with guilt. He would think I was a thief. What was worse, a thief who stole from someone much worse off than myself. As he bent over an open book of music, I thrust my hand into my pocket, leaned towards the fireplace and quickly pushed the pearl into one of the crevices of the carved marble surround. He looked up again just as I stepped away from the hearth. ‘Nor was it customary in Germany until recently.’

  He was obviously much more closely connected with the war than I would ever be, a fact confirmed when later that evening, I overheard Ava and my mother discussing him.

  ‘Poor young man . . .’ That was my mother. ‘According to the aunt, his entire family wiped out . . .’

  ‘. . . Nazis . . .’ Ava’s voice was hushed. ‘. . . God knows what horrors . . .’

  ‘. . . I shudder to think . . .’

  ‘. . . if it was Bella, I know how I’d . . .’

  ‘A refugee – what kind of a life can he have?’ asked my mother. She paused. ‘The bloody war.’

  Twice a week that summer, I walked out of our gate and down to Mrs Sheffield’s house. Whenever I climbed the stairs to Mr Elias’s room, I would hear him playing Schubert’s Trout Quintet or Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and for me, now, that music is inextricably associated with guilt and with him. Sometimes he would be la-la-ing along to the music and I would stand outside the door, knuckles ready to knock, listening to him, a prey to unfamiliar and exciting emotions to which I was unable at that time to give a name to.

  After the lesson we often talked, standing at the window looking out at the stripes of roadway, silver bars, green grass, yellow shingle, blue-grey sea. On those baking afternoons, the sun burned the shingle white. The sea panted with heat, resting like green silk under the milky sky. Between the dusty velvet curtains, I could see the boys waiting for the moment when my hour with Mr Elias was up, ready to scoff, jealous and, at the same time, frightened, realizing that we were all growing up, recognizing that something which had until now been fixed was now in the process of changing. I often saw Orlando, too, the pale parts of his hair bleached white by salt and summer sunshine. Separated from the other boys, he would stare up at the window, frowning, and as I watched, would bend down, pick up a pebble and pulling back his arm, hurl it far out into the sea then stood with his back to the houses, watching as it hit the surface and sent up a spray of white water like an erupting volcano.

  ‘Look down there,’ Mr Elias said one time. ‘Those are your friends. And the boy with the striped hair, what is his name?’

  ‘Orlando. He’s terribly clever.’

  ‘And you, Miss Alice, are you clever?’

  ‘Quite clever,’ I said. ‘But nothing like Orlando. He’s awfully talented, too. He plays all sorts of instruments and he won a scholarship to his choir school. My mother says he’s a genius. He had his IQ tested and it was something enormous. My father says he’ll either end up as a Nobel prize winner or on the scaffold.’

  ‘This seems a strange assessment of a boy so young. Do you think your father is right?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘At least, not the scaffold part. He’d escape somehow.’

  For the sake of the poor refugee and his wiped-out family, I practised my scales over and over again. I could pick out Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on the piano in my own house, and Three Blind Mice, but now I began to practise more and more assiduously. Scales . . . up, up, up, and down again. Arpeggios. Chromatic scales, octaves. I progressed from scales with one hand to scales with both, and then on to arpeggios and the ripple of chromatics. Over and over, until I could have played them in my sleep. I wanted Mr Elias’s approval. I wanted to stand between his knees, feel the warmth of his breath on my neck, the beat of his heart against my spine.

  As I grew more proficient, I sometimes envisaged myself seated on a stage, swaying across the ivory keys of a Steinway, the silk billows of my gown rustling, my hands flying, while an entire audience scarcely dared breathe for fear of disturbing the beauty of my playing. The Festival Hall, Sir Malcolm Sargeant, applause rippling beneath the domed roof like a swelling surging sea, cries of ‘Encore!’

  One afternoon, he declared that I was to learn a simple tune played with both hands at once. ‘We shall start with a song from my own country, which you shall play first with one hand and then, when you have mastered it, with both.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘Muss i’ den, muss i den, zum statle hinaus,’ he crooned into my ear. He gripped me between his knees as he put his hands over mine.

  ‘I know that song. My father sometimes sings it when he’s shaving.’

  ‘Then you will like to play this, I think, Miss Alice Beecham.’ His hands were warm and slightly rough. I could feel his breath on my neck, tickling the roots of my plaits. ‘Und du, mein schatz, bleibst hier.’

  I twisted round, stared at him. We were no more than two inches apart and his face swayed towards me so that I thought, lips already wrinkling with disgust, for a moment he might kiss me. I knew about kissing: Julian had tried it once, and I had found it fairly nasty. ‘Why do you always call me Miss Alice Beecham?’

  ‘What should I call you?’

  ‘Alice, of course. That’s what everyone else says.’

  He smiled gravely. ‘But I am not everyone else.’

  I looked at him more closely. Under a mop of wild black c
urls, he had light hazel eyes, surrounded by thick dark lashes and in one pupil was embedded, like a jewel, a star-shaped speck of green, the colour of a sunlit meadow, a revealing glimpse of what lay behind his eyes. Looking deep into them, and beyond, right into his head, I saw that indeed he was not like everyone else. Here was someone who was not just a man enclosed in the shell of maleness, but someone, like Orlando, whom I knew and recognized. His hand grazed one of the breasts I was beginning to develop with a shiver that touched something dark and dangerous at the base of my belly.

  ‘Still, I don’t like being called by my full name.’

  ‘Very good. Then I shall call you Alice. But then you must call me Sasha.’

  ‘Sasha?’ I could feel a blush surging up from my neck. My hands were sweaty. We weren’t accustomed to calling grown-ups by their Christian names.

  ‘My real name is Alexander. Sasha is my pet name.’ He rubbed his fingers down my arm and moved back from me.

  Should I be calling my piano teacher by his pet name? It seemed wrong.

  As I was leaving, he put a hand on my shoulder. ‘When shall you escort me to the public library, Miss Alice?’

  Pulses jumped under my blouse. I felt sick and apprehensive, but at the same time, exhilarated. ‘Um . . . soon.’ I was evasive. ‘I have to ask my mother.’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘I’ll tell you next lesson.’

  ‘I shall be waiting.’

  When I woke each morning, it was no longer Orlando that I contemplated. All my life he had been my safe harbour, but now my guilty, undefined thoughts fluttered like coloured butterflies, the scarlet of strawberries, the pinky-yellow of honeysuckle, around the lonely shape of Sasha Elias.

  FOUR

  Orlando’s attitude to Nicola was disconcerting. I could see that he not only disliked her, he feared her as well. It was the first time I had seen a breech in his armour of precocious self-confidence; to a certain extent, despite my own infatuation with her, I could understand his unease.

  Fiona didn’t like her, either.

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t spend so much time with her,’ she said one morning.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’s not a good influence.’

  I didn’t argue because I was reluctantly beginning to see that she was right, that my idol had feet of clay. Two days ago, Nicola had taken me into Woolworths and, under her tutelage, I had unwillingly shoplifted a lipstick, two biro pens and some sweets. These were hidden in the back of a drawer, weighing on my conscience more heavily than cannon balls. I didn’t want them, couldn’t possibly have brought myself to use them. I’d felt none of the elation that I could see in Nicola’s face when we finally emerged into the High Street without attracting the attention of the store detectives who, Ava had told us many times, lurked in the aisles, masquerading as ordinary people with shopping bags, keeping an eye out for thieves, ready to clap them on the shoulder as they tried to get out of the store and drag them off to the police station. Even more terrifying was the thought of what Fiona would say if she ever found out.

  ‘And since we’re on the subject,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to see you behaving the vulgar way she does, in front of your brothers, or anyone else.’

  Again I was silent, well aware of what she meant. Nicola had an apparently careless way of standing or sitting which much later I would recognize in the provocative poses of the Balthus nymphets. More than once, I’d seen Bertram Yelland and even Gordon Parker, staring at the shadows visible under her short skirts. When we swam on the beach, she changed into her bathing costume with only the merest hint of modesty. Sometimes her towel fell down to show her top half; sometimes she would bend over to pull on her skirt, apparently without realizing that we could, if we cared to, see her naked buttocks. Julian, in particular, seemed to be transfixed by her lack of shame. Where the rest of us turned away in embarrassment, he stared openly, his hands folded at the top of his thighs, or with his knees drawn up.

  None of these perceptions dimmed my admiration. ‘Can I have my hair cut like Nicola?’ I asked one morning.

  ‘You’re still a bit young.’

  ‘I’m almost twelve.’

  ‘Twelve?’ Fiona said vaguely. ‘Goodness, yes, I suppose you are.’

  ‘And plaits are so babyish.’

  ‘Some of your other friends have plaits.’

  ‘Not Nicola.’

  ‘Hmmm . . .’ she said drily. She didn’t seem to see this as a recommendation.

  Orlando, who’d been lounging in an armchair, moved in on my behalf. ‘If you think about it, though, Alice’s plaits are such a bother to do,’ he said, smooth as dripping. ‘You’d save a lot of time if you don’t have to do them every morning.’

  ‘That’s very true.’

  ‘So I can have them cut off?’

  ‘Let me think about it. I don’t want you growing up too fast.’

  When a couple of days later, Fiona agreed that I could go to Bette’s Salon and have my hair cut short, I was ecstatic, although I felt a brief pang at the loss of my moments alone with my mother. The desire to enter what I perceived as Nicola’s far more sophisticated world was too strong. I believed I would end up looking something like Nicola, that I would become a different shape, a different size, a better, prettier, more fascinating person at the snip of a pair of scissors. With my plaits gone, I too would emerge from my dumpy chrysalis and fly like a butterfly in little denim skirts and skimpy tops, charming everyone.

  Enchanted as I was by Nicola, I had to admit that there was a more sinister side to her. Once, as we sat on the beach, idly throwing stones into the sea, she asked us what we were most afraid of. ‘I’m absolutely terrified of spiders, for instance,’ she confided, gazing at us with wide eyes.

  ‘That’s called arachnophobia,’ said Orlando.

  ‘Oh, you’re so clever, Orlando. I wish I was clever like you.’

  ‘Do you really?’ He stared at her, one eyebrow raised.

  ‘Of course I do. I’d get top marks at school, and I wouldn’t be afraid of anything, just like you.’

  ‘Who says I’m not afraid of things?’

  ‘Like what, then?’

  ‘Clowns,’ I said, thoughtlessly. ‘You hate clowns.’

  ‘Clowns?’ Nicola laughed. ‘You’re afraid of clowns?’

  ‘Not afraid. I just think they’re stupid.’

  ‘Isn’t that the whole point of them?’ said Charles.

  ‘What’s there to hate about a clown?’ Nicola persisted. ‘I mean, is it their big feet you don’t like? Or those stupid bobbles they wear? Or is it their faces, all painted up, and those big slobbery lips?’ There was a curious light in her eyes, a small smile on her face.

  ‘Nothing particular,’ Orlando said. ‘I just don’t like them.’

  ‘It’s their faces, isn’t it? Those awful white masks. Terrifying, I suppose, if you’re frightened of that kind of thing.’

  Orlando got up. His upper lip was sweaty as he stood looking down at her. ‘There’s a money spider on the collar of your blouse,’ he remarked.

  She screamed, batting at her neck, twisting around in panic as though trying to shake the thing off.

  ‘Here, let me . . .’ Julian bent close, pretending to examine her blouse. ‘I can’t see anything. He’s having you on.’

  Orlando grinned brutally. The pebbles shifted under his feet as he turned to climb the shifting slopes of the beach. ‘I’m going to the library,’ he said. ‘You want to come, Alice?’

  ‘Yes, go on, Alice,’ said Nicola, her eyes vicious. ‘Go and be a little swot like him.’

  I was torn. I could see how badly Orlando needed me to be on his side in the unspoken war between the two, but I wanted to stay with Nicola, be part of whatever hidden spell she exerted. ‘I’ll stay here,’ I muttered, not meeting his eye, knowing I was making the wrong decision, that by letting him down, I was letting down myself.

  Although the rest of us were away at school, during term-ti
me Nicola took the train every day to the grammar school, the school where Prunella Vane taught domestic science and Bella had recently started.

  ‘That girl’s really awful.’ Bella told us, half-admiringly, when we came home for the holidays. ‘She cheeks the teachers, and skips classes and all sorts of things.’

  ‘What do they say to her?’

  ‘Trouble is, she gets good marks in everything so there’s not much they can say.’

  ‘Does she have lots of friends?’ I asked jealously.

  ‘Sort of friends. There’s a group she goes round with. But I don’t know if they really like her. I don’t,’ said little Bella. ‘I saw her pinching money out of someone’s blazer pocket one day. And another time, she was making fun of Sandra Holden in the meanest way, just because she’s got sticky-out teeth. Your mother would be furious if she heard I’d done something like that.’

  ‘So would yours.’

  ‘Gosh, yes.’

  I saw Nicola in action not long after that. ‘Ghastly lumpy old thing, isn’t she?’ she said to us one afternoon, as we sprawled on the green.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Her. Look, over there. Old Fatty Vane.’

  I looked down the road and there was Prunella, eating an ice cream and staring at the sea. Although I had no particular liking for her, I felt a need to protect her. ‘She’s not so bad.’

  ‘If I was as fat as that, I’d kill myself,’ Nicola said.

  ‘Why?’ asked Orlando.

  ‘Because no one would look at her twice.’

  ‘You’re looking at her. And you’ve looked at her before.’

  ‘No man, I mean.’ said Nicola.

  ‘Do you want men to look at you?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Aha . . . that explains it.’

  The mockery in Orlando’s voice seemed to sting her. ‘Explains what?’

  ‘Everything.’

  Flushing, she turned to me. ‘Don’t you want men to look at you, Alice?’

  ‘Not really.’ I knew from Ava the perils of having men looking at you; that they were only after One Thing, though I was hazy about what that singular Thing might be. ‘Not at all, actually.’