The Best Thing for You

by Annabel Lyon

  Your face, my dearest, when the soldier met us at the gate last night (only last night! it seems years ago now), when he put his hand on my arm and we realized he would not let it go; your face when I stumbled and had to ask him to slow down on account of my limp: eyes like jewels and hair like embers. No, my dear, don’t be afraid. Remember we had just spoken of the garden, and the warmth of the nights now, and of our watercolours? Remember we had just decided to look for forget-me-nots to paint in the morning, and how you thought you had seen a cluster near Mrs. Thomson’s house? The soldier thought I had been too long at the Anchor, but you know my dear that was not true, not last night at any rate. They have all seen “Old Mac” about the village often enough to know my gait. That soldier was young and himself intoxicated, I think, with his own uniform and important business, there at our garden gate. He reminded me of the students at the College now, so young and proud and pleased to dismiss their elders like flies from the feast table, to show them their own irrelevance.

  Now you will say I am moaning, and you are right, it does not suit a grown man. But, Margaret, have we not suffered a little, we two? Have we not seen our work ignored, where once we were respected; have we not gone from comfort and success to this exile’s life, forced to be grateful for what crumbs of work still come our way? And you, my dear, have you not suffered even further in putting up with my melancholies and my nocturnal ramblings always ending at one of two places, places you know all too well though you have never set foot inside either? Ah, Margaret, let us moan a little, just this once, and get it off our chests.

  When I was a young man I lived a kind of double life, a day-life at the architectural firm and a night-life at the art college, and my greatest dream was to reconcile the two, the straight line and the curved, the leaf and the bloom. Now it seems I am cast in that role again: puttering old flower painter in a deerstalker muttering over his pint, and German spy, as swift and stealthy and deadly by night as I am lame and harmless by day. There’s a frightful flower from an unlikely seed, wouldn’t you agree?

  One cannot of course control how one is seen by others. One can never in fact hope to control the totality of anything; I think that has been one of the greatest disappointments of my life. I never desired to be an architect, or a painter, or a designer of fabrics or furnishings, but rather some grand embodiment of all these, creating houses whole with a new way of living already complete inside them. Perhaps I am not so very far off the level, as far as the Germans are concerned, now that I see the words written, for the Germans are a people who admire discipline and control, and can be as inflexible in their way as is a certain Scot in his. No, don’t chide me, I am not all straight in my head tonight and am mixing ideas like colours on a palette, though my hand is clumsy and everything comes out a muddy kind of grey. They have me in a cell, Margaret, a room of such unremitting dreariness I think even you and I together could not salvage it. I spent some moments trying, if you can believe it, the first minute after they showed me in, my mind not yet caught up to my eye, which raced ahead as is its custom – a frieze rail perhaps, a wheat-coloured rug, a simple square light fixture in one corner, one of your large gesso panels above the cot – but our old accustomed lightness ill suits this gloomy place, and when I caught myself playing with pale colours and spring-like visions I reproved myself sternly, as a schoolmaster might reprove a dreamy pupil, and set about in full consciousness to give the place, in the mind’s eye, its due – dark wood panelling, a sombre bare floor, and minimum of ornamentation. None of our old curves and ovals, but something harder and more geometric, balanced, spare, slashing through any pretence of prettiness. A new style, one we shall forge together, for your own eye has ever complemented and perfected my own.

  And forge it we shall, because here is news, dear Margaret, news that in its prematurity I had been keeping from you. Amongst those letters on my desk that have caused us such grief tonight was one from a new client, a German businessman, an admirer of the Mackintosh style (his words) who covets (and offers a small fortune for) a trinket with which to woo a young lady. Very well! But the gentleman further lets drop he is heir to a prominent Berlin department store, and that when the store passes into his stewardship he would be honoured to consult us on the refurbishment of the premises, and perhaps on two or three as-yet unbuilt stores, if the German economy should one day prove favourable to an expansion into the suburbs. Of course I have not met the young gentleman, but his letter impressed me, with its mixed modesty and enthusiasm, and I intuit that we would understand one another completely, and he would not seek to dominate or impress upon me his own ideas. Money, he says explicitly, is no object.

  As for the trinket, well Margaret it is a metronome. It seems the young lady in question is an amateur musician, a pianist, and the gentleman from Berlin writes feelingly of how the object will mark the time between their visits together, and make that time more bearable by emphasizing its “finity.” (His English, have I mentioned, is delightful: very elegant and startled by more rules – each absolutely logical in itself – than have ever, I think, yoked the language before.) Apparently the lady is not unwilling, though the father is dead set against the marriage. It is a matter of religious difference, which is certainly an impediment though not, I think, in these modern times, so great a one as it once was. He is a romantic, I suspect, in that high, hopeless German vein, and I do not like him the less for it. I understand the innards are very like a clockwork’s so the construction should be straightforward. For some reason, when I imagine the casing, I keep seeing the Necropolis at the end of Firpark Terrace, where we lived when I was six, with its headstones and monuments and mausolea like little houses, where a small boy could play hide-and-seek for hours. I see the metronome like a little dark house, though I can hear you telling me I am wrong, for love is light and beautiful, not a queer, dark, boxed ticking. It was not so for us, at any rate, was it, my dearest? We always knew how to be together, we matched like right and left, like the palest silk gloves.

  It is the needle that fascinates me, the swing of the needle from left to right, from ill to good, from misfortune to fine redheaded luck. We are no longer young, and our own little houses will only ever be for two, yet I feel the pendulum has begun to swing back to us, and we will find a way out of this present unhappiness, to a place of love and work and calm where everything we do shall be the product of two souls so entwined that no one shall know what was yours and what mine; and we shall laugh at the confusion, as we ever have, and never care.

  I am always,

  Your loving

  Toshie

  May 10, 1915

  Dear Herr Goldberg,

  Many thanks for your letter. I have never heard of a lady wooed, let alone won, with a metronome, but the challenge is one that appeals to me very much. So you remember my drawings for the Deutsche Kunst, for the House of an Art Lover competition. I think you must have been very young, for they were published in Germany well over a decade ago. I am not averse to attempting a design in that style, as you suggest, though I have moved on significantly since and would prefer to put some of my more recent ideas into practice. The whites and creams and pale gem colours I favoured at that time would at any rate not suit the project you suggest. The metronome is a symbol, is it not? I was thinking, rather, blue.

  The fee you propose is generous; indeed, I could design a flock of metronomes for the sum, and probably persuade them to fly, into the bargain. There remains the small matter of the present war, which I fear might delay delivery of the finished article, but let us cross that bridge when we come to it. Perhaps I shall fletch the object after all, and send it on its way to you independent of all postal systems, checks, borders, customs, stops, searches, suspicions, or prejudices of any kind.

  Your letter has given me the greatest pleasure. What higher calling, after all, could art serve, than the pursuit of love? There is nothing like a lady’s hesitation to spook a man; believe me, sir, I have served in those trenches myself, a
nd I know. Thus I wish you all happiness and Godspeed in your suit, and will do my all on this side of things to further a victory of the heart. I am,

  Yours very sincerely,

  Charles Rennie Mackintosh

  Herr Professor Gerhard Weber met Daniel Goldberg for the first and last time in the winter of nineteen forty, when brown ice candied the puddles and street corners cut sharp as paper against the cold air. The go-between, a former university colleague who had turned to the black market in antiquarian objects when the race laws cost him his teaching position, had chosen an address in a part of town unfamiliar to Herr Professor Weber. Many of the storefronts were boarded over and scrawled with more and less official graffiti, and on the sidewalk glass crumbs crunched beneath his shoes along with ice. The streets were virtually deserted. He passed a girl in a felt coat with a paper pinned to the lapel who averted her face when he neared, and a pair of men who pulled their hats low, pushed their hands deep in their pockets, and finally crossed the street and disappeared down a narrow alley to avoid any proximity to him. He himself was stopped by a greatcoated soldier who requested, in the charming accents of the Black Forest, his papers, returning them with a polite word or two when he saw that all was in order. The Herr Professor would not have minded chatting a moment with the soldier, who was young and seemed friendly enough and whose accent reminded him of his new wife’s, but his breast-pocketful of cash advised caution.

  Have one for me, the soldier called after him, and a moment later, in a starburst of wit: Have two! For the Herr Professor had confessed, as instructed, to being on his way to a pub far from his own neighbourhood, where no spy of his wife’s would report him. There was probably only a slim wedge of years between himself and the young soldier, but at the mention of a wife he saw the boy’s eyes deepen, as if in contemplation of a vast abyss. Deference, envy, awe: a wife! Beer, the Herr Professor guessed, was still his newest friend; women were probably a scuffle and sparkle and a handful of marks in a dim doorway. Wives were still distant as the sun. But he did not seem unhappy, the Herr Professor thought, raising a hand in world-weary benediction as he walked away, playing the role. Barracks life was probably more exciting, for the moment, than whatever the boy had left behind, school or some apprenticeship. The thought was not condescending. The Herr Professor was thankful for the extra start of years that had levered him into a profession, and then this wartime translation work, before the army could fix him up with his own greatcoat and gun. He had loved his studies, loved the arcane logic of medieval law (his area of speciality), loved his sweet, sensible wife and the life they had embarked on together. It was that future life, and an urge to insure it, that had brought him to this neighbourhood with all the cash money he could reasonably muster and an address he had sworn not to write down.

  The air, dark blue now, smelled of smoke, rank creamy garbage, and fried potatoes. So there was life hidden in these buildings after all, cautiously cooking in the innermost, window-less rooms. He was glad.

  Weber, a voice said from somewhere quite close, though he saw no one.

  He had arrived at what had once been a chemist’s shop, saw the three numbers inscribed in his memory realized in pale, unvarnished wood on the otherwise lacquered black door, ghostly absences where the ornate ironwork of the original fixtures had probably been pried away for scrap. The windows were nailed over with boards. He closed his eyes in sudden, immense fatigue. The voice spoke again from his feet.

  Weber.

  He looked down and saw through a grating in the brickwork the face of his former colleague.

  I come, he said, and vanished with a jerk. The Herr Professor guessed he had been standing on a chair by the high basement window and had jumped off to scurry away, around and up, through the dark, to the door. He caught the metaphor and reproved himself. His former colleague had specialized in religious architectural history, wrote several books on the building of Gothic cathedrals, and had a particular fondness for gargoyles, which he delighted to sketch. On weekends he would ride his bicycle for miles to remote villages and monasteries, looking for specimens like some frog-besotted botanist. Also he had a deep voice and liked Russian caviar.

  Quickly, he said, opening the door.

  The Herr Professor ascended the three steps to the threshold and felt another wave of fatigue. His former colleague was already at the back of the store, a dim impatient figure holding back a heavy curtain, trying to hurry him through the chaos: a smell of mildew and char and something cloyingly floral, a broken perfume bottle, perhaps. Cardboard advertising displays – lipstick, chocolate, foot powder, tonics – littered the ground underfoot. An apothecary’s counter had been picked clean, probably before the fire. Broken glass and rags still lay in a black-white drift of ashes someone had swept to one corner, and left. The Herr Professor had had time to see that his former colleague’s coat was dirty, and he had lost weight.

  You weren’t followed?

  The Herr Professor shrugged.

  In the basement his former colleague introduced Herr Goldberg. They shook hands. The icons, wrapped in oilcloth and hidden in a butter crate, proved first rate: Saint John Chrysostom and a gaunt Saint Peter, both looking pinned, afflicted with gilt.

  Only the two? the Herr Professor said, feeling inside his coat for his money.

  The older man spread his small hands.

  We sold the third last week, he said. I have, if you like –

  The Herr Professor shook his head, not wanting to know.

  For your wife, Herr Goldberg said, producing a tiny glass perfume bottle, clear, yet with a pink and blue gasoline sheen. The Herr Professor thought of his wife, of her fine hair and large hands, and the way she shaped the pillows, warm and plump as loaves on the bed each night. He had had to leave her behind, in Tübingen, when war duty called him to Berlin. He had not seen her in some months.

  Not expensive, the older man whispered.

  There was a clay wine-cup, too, and a metronome by a famous designer. The Herr Professor began to bargain zestily, as if in a fever-dream, to drown out the voice of his conscience. There was a story he remembered from childhood, something about a boy in a chocolate shop, who glutted himself and ended poorly. His former colleague, who had resumed his watchful post on the chair by the high grated window, glanced back over his shoulder from time to time. The deep shadows near the ceiling seemed to cast his features in grimaces of leering approval, or disgust, or both.

  How many of you are there? the Herr Professor asked finally.

  Herr Goldberg had been watching him count bills off the roll.

  Four.

  Four, the Herr Professor said, reckoning the cost. Where will you go?

  England.

  And where do you live meanwhile?

  The older man shrugged. But seeing the question had been posed without malice, he appeared to change his mind, and gestured for the Herr Professor to follow him. In the very rear of the basement he pulled aside a curtain strung up across an archway. In an alcove lay a woman on a cot, clearly a sickbed. Beside her sat a girl in her mid-twenties, thin and wan, dandling a small blond child on her knee.

  My son is already in London, with a friend, Herr Goldberg said, letting the curtain fall back. We hope to join him there.

  That evening the Herr Professor locked the door to his little apartment and imagined showing his wife his purchases, telling her about Herr Goldberg and his family, in the basement of the burnt-out pharmacy. Long into the night he talked to her ghost, about what he could have done, should have done, whether to return the articles, whether to resell them on the black market (for surely a German could extract higher prices than a Jew) and return the money to the little family. She would know Goldberg’s department store from the advertisements in her sewing magazines. The Herr Professor told his absent wife he had liked Herr Goldberg, who throughout the transaction had showed great courtesy, dignity, and tact.

  The curtains turned from black to grey; and, as he pushed himself up from the
table with the extra effort of anticipation (after a sleepless night, a long day at the Ministry blackening his hands with newspaper clippings, trying to recall a vocabulary from his student days in England, coyly tucked in the landscape of his mind behind the looming hills of more recent experience, and frightened to still deeper cover by the approaching footsteps of his immediate superior, who had the authority to demote him from intelligence to infantry if his work turned slow or sloppy), his eye lit upon a tin of sardines on the counter next to the hot plate, and he remembered he had seen the same brand of sardines on the table in the alcove behind the curtain, a tiny detail from the Goldberg family tableau. And the knowledge that they had this in common, he and that poor family, a meal of sardines in the near future, warmed and comforted him; for in preserving himself was he not thereby preserving a part of them, too – a shred of shared humanity – if only in memory? The thought bore no great weight, was like a rickety wooden bridge across a roaring gorge fit for one man to cross once before it collapsed in splinters and shards. But it got the Herr Professor across the gap – narrow, but impossibly deep – between night and dawn (the curtains were rosy now), got him into a clean shirt and off to the Ministry in good time, got him through a morning of exceptional industry and accomplishment (earning him a hand on the shoulder from his superior), got him all the way through to the end of the day, that anticipation of a meal he had eaten a hundred times before, yet never savoured with the proper gratitude and humility until now.

  Now, Ulrike Weber said.

  There was more to the story, she said, but at a certain point she had stopped listening. That her father had paid more than he could easily afford for the objects, and far more than their owner asked for them, did not interest her. That her father had liked the man and felt a kinship with him, equally, she disdained. He had profited off a Jew during the war, and that was the bridge that had broken under her father’s weight, the bridge she could not now cross.