The next morning Netta still expected Jenny or her papa to say something about her eavesdropping by the bannister yesterday, but neither of them did. Jenny just gave her the sandwiches she made for her to take to school and smiled with her red lips saying, ‘There you go, my darling, now you have a good day, won’t you.’ And then she just stayed as she was, bent over, staring at Netta. Smiling with her mouth but not with her eyes, like a doll. And Netta was learning fast that sometimes when adults say nothing it’s even worse than when they tell you off.
Netta hurried off to school, dumping the sandwiches behind the woodpile in the garden on her way out. Not because Jenny had made the sandwiches, but because that’s what she always did with her sandwiches since the teachers had forbidden her from giving them to any other children at lunchtime. What choice did she have? She just wasn’t that hungry and no one would listen when she told them that; they just kept making her food and kept telling her to eat it. Adults were like the British soldiers who still hung around on the streets: they spoke a different language and had no intention of learning hers.
‘What are you doing here?’ Max smiled, genuinely happy, but knocked off balance somewhat, to see his friend sitting on the doorstep when he returned from his morning house calls.
‘Well that’s a nice way to greet your best buddy now, isn’t it!’
‘I’m sorry. I mean, I thought you’d be at work. And—and…what are you doing on the doorstep? It’s cold out here, you should be inside.’
‘Did you mean: you thought I’d be at work, or I should be inside? Come on, Max, what exactly did you mean by What are you doing here? Make up your mind!’
Max begun to stutter, grappling for an answer. Edgar laughed and grabbed his friend by the shoulders warmly, despite the temperature of his long hands, as a demonstration of the greeting he was hoping for. Max returned the half-embrace – the most cordial greeting for two men in the middle of the street without overstepping the lines of propriety – and only then did his brain manage to concoct a worthy response; a little late but he thought it worth saying anyway.
‘Can’t a man mean two things with one sentence?’ he grinned.
Edgar instantly appreciated this and added, ‘Absolutely! My entire sex life is built on that premise.’
The two men sniggered and Max ushered his lewd friend away from the house in case Erika still had patients in the surgery who might overhear him. ‘Come on, let’s go for a little walk along the canal then you must come in for some lunch. I assume you’re not working today?’
‘Oh, I am, but my shift doesn’t start until three.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Well, we can’t all live the GP’s life of Riley, you know.’ Edgar studied Max’s silent response to this and knew that that wasn’t quite how Max saw his life. But there was certainly a change for the better in the man and Edgar was determined to find out what the remedy was. ‘Anyway, since you never come around to my place I thought Mohammed (as I’m known to some of my kinkier boyfriends) should come to the mountain.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, but you know how it is, what with working nine to five and the family.’
‘Oh, here we go!’ said Edgar, switching to the most irritating whine he could muster and declaring, ‘You don’t understand, Edgar, how hard it is to have a wife and kid.’
Max huffed with amusement and took it on the chin, but Edgar hadn’t finished and his tone became surprisingly earnest.
‘You always say that, you heterosexuals, as if having a wife and kid was a curse that you didn’t ask for. I assume it was your choice to marry Erika? Your choice to have Netta?’
‘Of course—’ Max mumbled his response because he wasn’t sure he could say that unequivocally, not in the same way a child would choose lemon sherbets over raspberry drops in the confectioner’s on the High Street.
‘Do you not think,’ Edgar continued, ‘that I might like to have a… partner and a child one day?’
‘And perhaps you will.’
‘Not in my lifetime, Max, come on. It’s only been a few years since we stopped sending queers to gas chambers, I don’t think marriage and kids is on the cards for me any day soon, do you?’
Max put a consoling hand on his friend’s back and they walked that way for a few steps until Edgar found his usual public persona again. ‘Hey, I didn’t come here to talk about me anyway, I came to find out how you are. Did Dr Siskin help you at all?’
‘Pah!’
‘Oh, that good, was he?’
Max shook his head, smiling at the towpath.
‘But something’s going right for you. There’s a bit of that old spark back behind those little spectacles.’
Max’s smiled broadened.
‘There is, isn’t there? Come on, out with it! Not that I don’t know, of course.’
‘Well…’ Then Max suddenly registered Edgar’s last sentence. ‘You know? You’ve heard?’
‘Of course! The hospital is a small world, as you well know. I hear everything about who comes and goes.’
‘Has she been to the hospital?’ Max looked concerned. ‘Is there something wrong?’
‘Not that I know of. I’m sure it was just routine, you know.’ Edgar stopped and examined his friend. ‘Who are you talking about?’
‘Jenny.’
‘Jenny?’ Edgar had to think for a moment before the penny dropped, ‘Jenny? The girl from Gegesha?’
Max nodded sheepishly.
‘What about her?’
‘She’s living with us.’
If Edgar wore glasses like his friend, he’d be looking over the top of them right now in utter incredulity.
‘She’s our new housekeeper. She saw the ad in the paper. She’d come to Dortmund to find me.’
Edgar held up a hand to silence Max. ‘Hold on! Just hold on there a minute, buddy! Let me get this straight. Your first housekeeper is murdered.’ Edgar looked over Max’s shoulder at the canal and shuddered. ‘The murderer has not been found yet, by the way, so the cops are creeping all over your place, and then you go and employ a prostitute as your next housekeeper, but not any old prostitute, which would be bad enough, but a prostitute who has the hots for you. And now you’re both living as snug as a bug in the same house as your wife and your parents?’
Max grinned.
‘Are you mental?’
‘What?’ Max whinged disingenuously.
Edgar let out a quiet scream of concern for his friend, but his eyes were aflame with the entertainment value inherent in the situation. ‘Buddy, come on!’
‘She doesn’t have the hots for me,’ Max laughed, though somewhere in the dark recesses of his ego he hoped in fact that Edgar would reaffirm the notion that she did. ‘We’re just friends.’
‘I seem to remember her kissing you in rather more than a friendly manner when she came to see you in the hospital.’
‘But that was after…’ He could barely bring himself to say the name. ‘…Volkov had beaten me up. I was badly injured at the time, she was just being nice.’
‘And she came all the way to Dortmund, hunted you down and is living under your roof, just to be a friend, just to be nice? What does Erika think of this? Don’t tell me she doesn’t know about you and her?’
‘There’s nothing to know. She knows we knew each other in Gegesha. But she thinks she was a housekeeper for the Russians there.’
Edgar’s guffaw echoed beneath the bridge, despite the bridge being a long way down the towpath from where they stood. The British soldier leaning there, smoking, straightened up and looked curiously down the canal at the two Jerries deep in conversation.
‘What can I say, buddy? I’d just play this one very carefully if I were you. My lord, and I thought my love life was complicated!’
They stood there in silence for a moment looking at the mists coming out of their own mouths like two more smokers before Max prompted Edgar to start walking back to the house.
‘Here,’ Edgar said, handing Max the
paper bag he’d been holding.
‘What’s this?’
‘A little gift for Netta. From one of those American stores in the city.’
Max pulled a white tin lunchbox from the bag. It had cartoon baseball players, marching band musicians and baton twirlers all over it.
‘I thought it might encourage her to enjoy eating a bit more, you know.’
Max wasn’t sure it would do that, but he was touched by his friend’s thoughtfulness and as they walked on he wished the world they lived in was one where Edgar could be a father one day. And after a few more steps of pensive silence from both men, Max looked at Edgar quizzically and said, ‘What did you mean when you said you knew? Knew what my good news was, and then said something about the hospital?’
‘Oh, I meant I had heard Erika was at the hospital. Seeing Dr Fischer. So naturally I thought your great news was going to be that Erika is pregnant.’
‘Oh yes. That too,’ Max said.
Everything was supposed to be perfect now. Max and Erika were working together. He would go out on house calls in the morning while she saw patients in the surgery. Then after they both ate lunch in the house, Erika would go out in the community while he saw patients in the surgery. The pregnancy was going smoothly, the housekeeper was competent. Max seemed more content and more talkative, but it irked Erika that most of his talking was done to Jenny or at least when Jenny was around. So Erika found herself inventing all manner of errands for Jenny to keep her out of the house as much as possible when Max was there.
‘Would you pop into town and get some Henko, Jenny?’ Erika held out the money for the soda to indicate the urgency, but Jenny was up to her elbows in washing up and looked amused at the idea of taking the money with soaking wet hands.
‘Just leave it on the table there, Erika, I’ll do it later.’
It peeved Erika that Jenny thought she could call everyone by their Christian names. It peeved her that Max didn’t do anything to discourage it, but it peeved her more that Jenny always seemed to skew their intercourse so that Erika felt like the one being told what to do.
‘Oh, don’t worry about the washing up.’ She tried to sound carefree. ‘I’ll finish that.’
‘What’s the point of having a housekeeper,’ Max laughed as he packed his bag on the kitchen table, ‘if you’re going to do all the housekeeping? Haven’t you got a surgery to set up?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘And I’ve got house calls to make so I’ll see you all later.’
He was on his way out, but was happily stopped in his tracks by Jenny’s enquiry, ‘Who do you have the pleasure of examining first?’
Erika heard the playful innuendo and watched the way it tickled Max. ‘Oh, just an old lady with arthritis, but she makes really good cakes.’
‘Oh, so not that old dragon with the leeches then?’
‘Max!’ Erika said, still standing in the middle of the kitchen with the money in her hand.
‘What?’
‘You shouldn’t be discussing our patients with the housekeeper,’ she scolded him carefully, choosing the words our and housekeeper to demarcate her territory and remind Jenny that hers did not include Max.
Jenny shook her head at the crockery in the sink.
‘But it’s Jenny. It’s not as if it’s any old housekeeper, is it?’
‘Oh?’ She knew he was referring to his friendship with Jenny before her appointment, but nevertheless Erika let the question hang in the air, daring him to elaborate on any other way in which this was not any old housekeeper. ‘What about the Hippocratic Oath?’
He looked blankly at her, not because he had no idea what she was talking about, but because he was starting to shut down again, the sediment taste of the alienation of his first few weeks back from Gegesha returning to his mouth.
‘Confidentiality?’ she bulldozed onwards. ‘You do remember and respect that still, if nothing else I hope.’ Even she was embarrassed by the excess of barbs on that last phrase so she massaged her pregnant belly in order to excuse her aggression, put it down to hormones, or just change the subject to her condition: perhaps she was in pain. But no sympathy came from her husband or the housekeeper. And after an excruciating crockery-knocked silence she sighed, ‘Will you take this money and run along to the shop now, please?’
‘I’ll go when Netta’s gone to school,’ came the response and Erika was incredulous at this woman’s effrontery.
‘Why?’ Max asked, more attuned to Jenny’s concerns than his wife’s right then.
‘I have to check something first,’ she said over her shoulder and then mumbled to the sink, ‘Someone’s got to have eyes on that child!’
Just before Erika acted on the urge to tear at the woman’s fashionably short blonde hair, the sound of her daughter’s little shoes on the tiles slapped her back to civility.
‘Ah, and here she is! Are you all ready for school?’ Jenny smiled, one wet hand on her hip, the other still in the water.
‘I’ll give you a lift if you want?’ Max said.
Netta considered this for a second, examined her father’s amiable expression, and then ran to join him at the door, keen to snap up the chance to have him to herself for a while.
‘You’re not taking her on the motorbike, are you?’ Erika grumbled.
Netta looked up at him hopefully.
‘Yes, it’s not far, she’ll be quite safe.’
‘Yes!’ Netta hissed triumphantly.
‘Don’t forget your sandwiches!’ Jenny said, pointing to the table and the white tin lunchbox Uncle Edgar had bought her.
The sight of the box – or rather the thought of its contents – took the wind out of Netta’s sails, and Erika was aware that Jenny was controlling the scene now like a puppet master. Netta grabbed the box and followed her papa out to the hallway.
‘Grab your coat!’ he called out. ‘And I’ll see you at the front.’
Erika was left in the kitchen watching the water dripping like time from the hand on Jenny’s hip onto the floor.
‘Now come and watch this!’ Jenny said suddenly, drying her hands and ushering Erika to the back door where she indicated to her – or ordered her as Erika saw it – to be quiet and to conceal herself out of sight of the woodpile, which leant against the shed.
The two women watched as Max took the motorbike from the shed and wheeled it out to the road. They then saw Netta enter the scene, now wrapped in her blue coat, the white collar buttoned up tight against the cold, white hat like a flying saucer perched on her head. They watched her tiptoe pointlessly across the soft turf to the pear tree, where she hid unsuccessfully and opened the American lunchbox. She then scampered to the woodpile, tipped the sandwiches it contained behind the logs and walked briskly after her father, nose in the air in a terrible imitation of innocence. And that was when Jenny pounced.
‘Just a minute, young lady!’ she spat and grabbed the startled girl by the arm.
Netta was speechless.
‘Come with me!’ Jenny dragged the girl whose eyes were already streaming back to the woodpile and, changing her grip now to the back of Netta’s neck, shoved her face towards the ground and the moulding pile of sandwiches the girl had been making there. ‘Look at that! What a waste! Do you think I spend my time making you sandwiches every morning so you can just toss them over here?’
‘Netta, what have you done?’ Erika, a little slower than usual due to her ever increasing size, was now inspecting the secret dump too. ‘Oh, Netta!’
Netta fought the tears furiously as she hung like a rodent in the talons of the eagle-eyed housekeeper.
‘And what a waste of money! Do you think it grows on trees, do you?’ Jenny yapped, shaking the girl, and Erika was about to intervene, get this stranger’s hands off her daughter, if it wasn’t for the next thing Jenny said: ‘You think your mother has worked for all these years alone to put food on the table so you can throw it behind the woodpile?’ If that tribute to Erika was supposed to ingrat
iate Jenny to her… it worked. ‘And do you think your father now goes out to work every day so you can waste his wages like this?’
‘What’s going on?’ Max had returned to the garden to find out what had happened to his passenger.
‘She’s been tossing her sandwiches out every day.’ Erika flapped a despairing hand at the logs. ‘No wonder she’s still underweight.’
Max examined the pile of wasted food on the damp ground, but he saw himself running his finger around a wooden bowl emptied of its skilly of potato and animal fat, licking condensation from the window of a Russian truck, scavenging cranberries and pine needles from the forest floor. He grabbed a chopped branch from the woodpile, grabbed his daughter from the clutches of the housekeeper and whacked at her bottom with all the ferocity that Sergeant Volkov had once whacked at his head with a bunch of keys, the keys which kept him locked away from the world for four whole famished years. He heard the squeals of pain and didn’t know whether they came from him, the bruised bleeding ball of himself on the floor of the labour camp office, or from his daughter.
‘OK enough, Max! That’ll do!’
Despite the pain and the uncontrollable sobbing, Netta could just about register surprise and resentment that the voice of reason here, her liberator right then, was not her mother but Jenny. She had pulled him away from the girl, who now fled into the house, and Max would have followed her, had Jenny not stood in his way and shouted:
‘Calm down, Max! Leave it now! I think she got the message.’
‘Calm down?’ Max seethed. ‘Calm down? You of all people should know,’ he said as if everyone present had been able to see the maelstrom of thoughts and memories which had raged inside him for the last minute or so. ‘You were there.’ He fought the tears just as his daughter had and with an equal lack of success. ‘You know what it was like.’
The Watcher Page 10
