by Susan Moody
‘Not tomorrow,’ I said. ‘But the next day. And then again at the end of the week.’
‘Excellent.’
She rested the back of her hand against the delicate skin of her temples. It was a strange gesture. It did not seem as though she had a headache, rather (or so I took it to be) it implied an inability to absorb anything more into a brain already overloaded with information. Her eyelids were very red, as though she had been weeping for hours. Mrs Beecham is not a pretty woman, but certainly she is what they call handsome. She gives me the impression always that she should be somewhere else, doing something different. Teaching in a university lecture hall, perhaps, or playing some instrument such as a harp, in a long green dress, a velvet band across her forehead. Sometimes I see her gaze rest upon her children and a look of confusion passes across her face. Where did they all come from? she seems always to be saying. Why am I here, when I should be altogether elsewhere?
I rest the pages on my knee. Sasha has caught my mother precisely. I remember so well that baffled expression on her face as she looked round at the breakfast table, the back of the wrist laid against her forehead, her red eyelids.
She said, ‘Why don’t you come to our house this afternoon, have a cup of tea with us? Then you can meet your new pupil.’ When she is gone, I speak in her voice, knowing that this is the way I must talk if I am to be accepted, if I am to be English, as Cousin Dieter wishes me to be.
‘My sisters and I were all taught to play music at an early age. . . .’ I say it over and over again, ‘My sisters and I . . .’ and then I am weeping, thinking of my own two little sisters who died God knows what ugly deaths.
Therefore, this afternoon I have called at the house of Mrs Beecham. It is ten houses away from here and has its name – Glenfield – on the gatepost. I knocked on the door with my knuckle because there was no doorbell or knocker, and Mrs Fiona Beecham, let me in. ‘Ah, Mr Elias,’ she said in her good English voice. ‘Do come in.’
She took me into a big room, where steps of cast iron lead down into the small front garden. There were German books on the shelves in this household and my eyes lit up. So the book-burning ceremonies I had imagined taking place across the length and the breadth of England did not happen after all.
Mrs Beecham saw what I was looking at. ‘Oh, do borrow them, Mr Elias,’ she said in a voice that was kind. ‘In fact, please take them all home with you to Mrs Sheffield’s. I don’t read German and neither do my children, and I’m quite sure my husband wouldn’t mind.’
Home . . . I must remember that I am English now. Instead of the big comfortable flat on Lindenstrasse, with its long windows overlooking the garden, this cold room with the worn Turkish carpet on the floor is my home. Outside the window there is a cherry tree here, just as we were having in München. Munich, I must call it now.
‘My husband was a Lektor in Tübingen before the war,’ Mrs Beecham told me, ‘He speaks fluent German, he was in Army Intelligence during and after it, because of his facility with the language.’
She opened her eyes wide, willing me not to make the connection between conquered and conqueror – perhaps she doesn’t know that I am Jewish.
I would like to tell her about my sisters. About Pappi and Mutti, all surely dead by now.
When darkness had fallen and I finally dared to leave the wardrobe where I’d been hidden, I found my mother’s pearls scattered on the floor. I took time to snatch up a handful of them before walking out into the deserted street.
The screams of Anna and Magdalena were in my ears. Oh my sisters, poor little gentle girls. I cannot allow myself to think beyond the threshold of our house in Lindenstrasse, although I imagine all too clearly what happened.
The German books of Mrs Beecham are old-fashioned and worn. There are scrawls over some of the pages and I imagine my new pupil as a younger child, taking a yellow wax crayon or a blue one in her fat little hands and scribbling over the paper.
Twenty years have gone by since he wrote them, and the world has changed, but his words are still as painful to read, as they must have been for him to write. I want to know if he ever found his family again. Above all, I want to know why he didn’t come looking for me in Paris.
A single star gleams above the horizon, which is streaked with the fiery reds of a summer sunset. Twenty-one miles away, French cliffs squat on the edge of the sea. Nearer to hand, something is caught among the intricate carvings of the marble fireplace surround, gleaming dully. It takes me a moment to recognize this as a pearl, and then to realize that this is my pearl, the one I hid there twenty years ago. It seems extraordinary that it should still be there. I prise it out and rest it on my palm. It seems to have meaning of some kind, though I know it cannot have; it is just part of a random pattern of events which are only loosely related one to the other.
I take up another sheet of Sasha Elias’s writing.
When this child, this Alice, comes to me for her first piano lesson, I see my sisters again and for a while I can forget my thoughts. For a while the loneliness goes. Although I do not say so, because I need the money, in truth I would happily give her piano lessons for nothing. She has dirty finger-nails and a grubby dress. Sometimes she smells a little unwashed. She looks as though nobody cares for her. I want to bath her, wash her hair, soap her thin shoulders, the way I did with my sisters. Her hands are beautiful, but very small. I doubt if she could ever be a good pianist because she will not be able to play octaves very easily. My other pupil is much more gifted, Mary Arbuthnot. I can see her becoming very good indeed. She also plays the flute very beautifully, as well as the piano, and is competent on the ’cello although she is still too young and small to get the full range out of it.
I would pay to teach Alice, if only to have, for two half hours a week, someone to speak to. To look into her soft brown eyes and see the shy dimple in her round cheeks. To hold her on my knee the way I held my sisters, Anna and Magdalena. I cannot even think of them because if I do, I will fall into an ocean of despair and will never again find the shore. I am tortured by the fact that I am alive and they are dead. If I had stayed with my family, could I have saved them? I know that of course I could not. I would be dead too. I wish I were.
Instead I sit in this big room and look out at the sea, at the masts of wrecked ships rising on the horizon, where, my landlady tells me, there are some treacherous sands, and that on New Year’s Day a cricket match is played there. Only the English, I think, as I smile politely and drink the tea she has prepared for me in her chilly basement kitchen, would think of playing cricket on a quicksand in the middle of winter. ‘Every year there are wrecks,’ she says. ‘Casualties.’ She gestures in the direction of the red, white and blue lifeboat that sits high up on the shingle to the left of my window. ‘You can hear the maroons go off to call the lifeboat men together. Such brave men . . .’
I think of the sailors screaming for their mothers as the cold water fills their mouths; my father told me that this is how most men die in battle, calling for their mothers.
‘Orlando, it’s me. Or should I say it is I?’
‘Me, I, it doesn’t matter. Either way I recognize your voice.’ I can hear him smiling.
‘You remember Sasha Elias, who taught me piano that last summer holidays we were here?’
‘I know who you’re talking about, if that’s what you mean.’
‘How would I find him, supposing I wanted to?’
‘I haven’t a clue. He taught music at that prep school in the country, didn’t he?’
‘Braybrook Park, yes.’
‘Perhaps he’s still in the area.’
‘I don’t think so. I ran into him in Paris, years ago,’ I say. ‘So he must have left here. He said he was studying composition with some famous teacher.’
‘Fiona might know.’
‘The name doesn’t ring any recent bells with you, does it? I mean, you’re both musicians.’
‘Sasha Elias . . . I don’t think so. Tell you what,
why don’t you get in touch with Vi Sheffield.’
‘Who’s she?’
‘You know, Mrs Sheffield, used to own the house you’re living in.’
‘Vi? Since when did you start calling her Vi?’
He considers. ‘About twenty-five years ago. I used to play chess with her.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I’m sure I did.’
‘I’m sure I would have remembered.’ He was always going off to have tea with what at the time I had considered elderly ladies. He had a way of smiling at them which made them smile back, which perhaps helped them to forget their anxieties for a while. And I’m sure they found his wiseacre manner extremely droll.
I put in a call to Braybrook Park, and am received with total incomprehension. The school has changed hands three times in the past twenty years, their records are not complete, nobody who is on the staff now was on the staff back then. After consultation with someone else in the office, I am given the name of a cousin of a current member of staff whose father-in-law might have been teaching games at the time. I write down the flimsy details I am given, though they are clearly nothing more than a dead end.
When I call the cousin, he tells me his father-in-law has Alzheimer’s and lives in a home. ‘Poor old boy,’ he says. ‘Used to be such an athlete. Now he can’t even lift a cup to his lips without slopping the contents all over the place. Forgotten just about everything he ever knew, that’s the problem. Anyway, even if he was still on the ball, I doubt if he’d be much use to you. He left Braybrook a good fifteen years ago.’
‘Nonetheless, it might be worth asking, just in case . . .’ I imagine lonely Sasha Elias confiding in an older man, telling him of his hopes and ambitions. But it’s pointless, I know. I met Sasha myself only ten years ago. I give the man my details, without any expectation.
‘Get back to you if I come up with anything,’ he says. ‘But don’t hold your breath.’
When I telephone her, Mrs Sheffield sounds efficient and businesslike, not at all like the uncertain woman I used to know. ‘I can’t do Tuesday or Wednesday,’ she says. ‘Is Thursday all right?
‘Perfect.’
‘Right, then. You’d better come to the house, not my office. So . . . after working hours, okay?’ She gives me instructions on how to reach her. She’s living half a mile away from my flat. ‘I look forward to seeing you again, Alice. It’s been a long time.’
Violet Sheffield, war widow, had seemed old to my twelve year old self, and, despite her brisk telephone manner and the fact that she is speaking from an office, I am expecting to meet someone now ancient, hair pulled back in a neat bun, tissue-paper complexion, with the upright posture instilled by the governess of a gently-bred Victorian miss. An elderly woman, in other words, reduced to mulling over her memories as she faces the ending of her life with dignity and courage.
The woman who opens the door of a Queen Anne house in the town centre is in her late fifties, seems to be clearly engaged with the present and far too busy creating new memories to be wasting time on the old. I realize then when I last saw her, she can’t have been much over thirty.
‘Alice . . . How very nice to see you,’ she says, holding out her hand then, after peering at me over her rimless half-glasses, pulling me towards her to brush my cheek with hers.
‘And you . . .’ She is wearing a short turquoise dress with a long glittery scarf flung around her neck. Her tanned arms are decorated with a number of thick gold bracelets. Her hair is artificially blonde and cut à la garçonne. ‘It’s been such a long time. You look fabulous, Mrs Sheffield.’
‘Vi, please. We’ve been through the Sixties. Those dreary bourgeois days when people your age addressed people my age as Mrs are far behind us. Thank God.’
Her metamorphosis is quite extraordinary. ‘Fine.’
She pours me a stiff gin-and-tonic. ‘Forgive me if I sound preoccupied,’ she says, ‘but I’m in the middle of a very complicated deal which, if it goes through all right, should net me a very nice profit.’
‘What do you do?’ I dimly remember my parents exclaiming in surprise at learning that like Louise Stone, she had bought a house in the North End, which in my childhood was considered little better than a slum, and was doing it up for resale. My father had referred to the project as a disaster.
‘I’m in property development.’ The telephone rings and she looks at it, then at me, winks, mouths ‘. . . three, four, five,’ then picks up the receiver. ‘Yes?’
From her end of the subsequent conversation, I gather – I have no choice but to listen – that her deal has gone through successfully, and she will be several hundred thousand pounds better off when the papers are completed. Her house certainly emphasizes that she is doing well, full of rich fabrics, heavy drapery, voluptuous sofas, good paintings. A long long way from the genteel poverty of the house on The Beach.
‘Aaah,’ she says, sighing happily, running her fingers through her hair, swallowing a large amount from her own glass. She pulls out the quarter of lemon it contains and sucks it. ‘Splendid! Now, Alice, you said you wanted to discuss something. How I can help you?’
In the face of such dynamism, I grow vague. She has moved on at a much faster pace than I have, so much so that I feel as though I have been beached upon the shore of a desert island. ‘Not discuss, exactly. I don’t really . . . I just wanted to . . .’
‘You recently bought the first-floor flat in my former house, didn’t you?’
‘That’s right. And I wanted to . . .’
‘Nothing wrong, is there?’ She looks at me hard, focuses for the first time. ‘How old are you, Alice?’
‘Thirty-two.’
‘Not that it’s any of my business. But you seem rather . . . worn, for someone your age.’
‘I haven’t been sleeping well.’ I laugh slightly. ‘Not that I came to consult you on sleeping pills or anything.’
‘Are you married?’
‘Divorced.’ I shift uneasily, hating the sound of the word, hating being divorced, hating the guy I once went out with, who’d tried to come on to me using the argument that nobody misses a slice off a cut cake. Bastard! I’d poured my drink in his lap and left.
‘What happened?’ asks Mrs Sheffield. It’s impossible to think of her as Vi.
I shrug. ‘He was American. We drifted apart, I guess. And then he found someone else. It seemed best to come home to England.’
‘How very insouciante you sound, Alice. Why did you marry him?’
‘For all the wrong reasons,’ I say.
‘Is there anyone else?’
I hesitate. ‘Sort of.’
‘Whose sort of, yours or his?’
I consider. ‘Maybe a bit of both.’
She leans back, crosses her legs. ‘And how is your mother?’
‘She’s fine. Living up in Oxford.’
‘She always wanted to move back there. I hope she’s happier.’
I would like to explore the possibilities implicit in that comparative. Happier than what, or when? Does she mean happier living in a city instead of beside this inhospitable bit of sea? Or simply that things have changed so much for the better?
Before I can ask, Vi is shaking her head. ‘God, they were hard times, those years after the war, all of us grieving, short of cash, children to bring up, the whole country trying to come to terms with victory and its implications. I suppose at the time, Shale was as good a place to live as any. All us women, mothers, had to rely on each other in a way that’s almost impossible to imagine now.’
‘How is Linda?’ I ask belatedly.
‘Very well indeed. Two children and a third on the way,’ She laughs. ‘She finds it a bit irritating that I don’t do the grandmother bit, babysitting and so on. I’ve already done that, I tell her, I’m damned if I’m doing it all over again.’
‘Do please say hello from me. And from my brothers.’ But I’ve come about something else. ‘The thing is,’ I say, stumbling ridiculo
usly over the words. ‘The thing is . . . the apartment – the flat.’
‘Yes.’
‘You used to have a music teacher living there. I took some piano lessons from him one summer.’
‘Yes, indeed. You and a few others, if I remember rightly. God, I’d almost forgotten him.’ She pulls at her drink again, offers me her profile as she stares pensively at the portrait of an officer in naval uniform which hangs above the fireplace. ‘Poor young man. Poor, poor boy. I felt terribly sorry for him, such a bedraggled sort of creature, so lost and lonely His entire family dying in the concentration camps . . . how do you get over such a thing? How can you possibly?’
‘I don’t suppose you ever do,’ I say. ‘Do you have any idea where he is now?’
‘None whatsoever,’ she says decisively. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I’d like to try and . . . and track him down, if possible.’
‘Why on earth . . . still that’s your business, not mine.’
Some explanation seemed to be called for. ‘It’s just . . . he left some music behind, some letters, a kind of diary. I thought he might want them back.’
‘Left them behind?’ Mrs Sheffield frowns. ‘Left them where, exactly?’
‘In the piano stool . . . the one that came with the papers. It’s the same one as was there when I—’
‘I don’t know what papers you mean, but the stool was empty, last time I saw it. I emptied it myself.’
‘Perhaps you’re thinking of a different stool. This was one of those with a seat that lifts up—’
‘I know exactly what it looks like. It came from my husband’s family, along with the piano. I hate leaving it behind, but . . .’ She spreads her hands. ‘. . . I’ve been moving around such a lot.’ She narrows her eyes at me. ‘You look as though you don’t believe me.’
‘No, of course I do.’
‘You can ask young Orlando, if you like. I paid him to help me clear the whole place out. Obviously this was long after your piano teacher had left.’
‘But the stool’s full of Sasha’s stuff,’ I blurt out.
