The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  I was not two years dead when he brought another woman in. To my place at the hearth. He did not once weep for me, nor for our lost infant son, drowned in the womb. The stupid midwife who would not listen when I told her there was a second child within. A boy! A boy who might have suckled at my breast, a boy whose tiny toes had drummed a tattoo inside my belly. Instead she boiled up onions and untied the knotted bedclothes. The doors of the church were flung wide open to ease the delivery. But all her superstition could not save me. If she had put her ear close to my lips I could have told her there was another child within, but who listens to a woman mad with hours of labour? And where was Josef? Out, away. He never was a man to stand a woman’s pain. He would not tell that new woman my name, although she heard it in the village. It’s better, he said, that I do not speak it. He knew that if he did a doorway would be opened, a doorway that would let me back in. And in the end he called me forth himself. Desire forced him to speak my name. Elena!

  Now I speak for two, for myself and for my son, who cannot speak for himself. He is the vampire in the barrel. The dead child I brought into this world who is trapped here. I could go, melt away peacefully, but there is no passage out for him unless I make it. So I have waited, hovering like a change of mood, a shimmer on the lake, a shiver in the trees.

  Some would call us spirits. Call us what you will, it is we who disturb the commonplace solemnity of the world because we cannot bear its complacent bulk, its solid satisfaction with the particular. We are imprisoned by the places that have imprisoned us. When humans look up into the night sky it is not just the vastness of the universe they feel, but us, the unhappily dead who crowd the hours of darkness. But do not think that we are benign. We take our sorrows with us. Remember, what I was, I am. A woman scorned.

  The sky opens. Large, fat drops at first, hesitant as a child’s sulky tears, then a downpour. Summer storm. I am running over sodden earth and greedy grass. Ahead the great smoke-coloured clouds gather like swathes of ruffled cloth. The trees feel me pass. I see the creased frown of their barks, their arms in leafy semaphore, passing the urgent secret on from one to the other, warning birds to scatter. I reach the angry river.

  There is a boy waist-high in water, a boy who could have been mine, but mine was buried in a field without the blessing of water. I do not even know where. Josef did it in the dark as if I had committed a crime by smuggling a dead child into the world. A swaddled corpse, a child knotted into birth clothes in an unmarked grave. This boy is standing in the fast-swelling water, his back to me, glistening. He is lost in some watery dream, while all about him the trees swirl and the clouds rail in a magnificent temper. By the river’s edge there are stepping stones, large flat ones on which we used to beat the laundry. They are worn smooth from bleach and lye and the silky brush of bare feet. I slip into the shallows and place a hand on this boy’s damp crown. The feathery touch alerts him. He turns his head.

  ‘Sissy?’ he cries.

  I grab him by the hair and plunge him under. Face down into the boiling spume. I hold him there. He struggles, arms thrashing, but his feet have lost their purchase. He does not surrender easily. It takes all my strength to hold him under. He must be totally immersed. This is a baptism for my son so he can be released. A baptism of desire.

  A voice calls.

  ‘Walter, Walter!’

  Josef’s voice, I let go of the child’s sodden locks and he floats off, a pale, bloated thing just visible amidst the foaming water. I rise slowly and wade back to the river bank. I make for the brushy undergrowth and sink into its thorny shelter. From here I see Josef stumble towards the edge. He contemplates the bundle of clothes his son has left, weighted down by a small stone. Oh, the puny defences of the world.

  ‘Walter?’ he calls again above the racket of the trees and the whipping, angry rain.

  He looks up and down the tormented river. He knows then. He stands, his head flung back, bellowing.

  ‘Walter.’

  I watch him and am pleased.

  Sissy stumbles back the sodden track away from the roar of the river, blinded by the rain, her skirts heavy, the rag-tails of her hair weeping. The shelter of the house is all she thinks of, the harbour of hearth, the dull ache of the familiar. The rain batters her as she pushes back the dipping arms of bushes, the thrashing stalks of sunflowers, her arms scraped by thorns, her clothes snagging in raging branches. She turns into the muddy yard. Mother’s geranium pots have crashed from the sills and roll about, the petals strewn in the pools the rain has made. She lifts the latch on the kitchen door and falls inside, leaning against the door to shut out the rage without. Mother rises from the hearth.

  ‘Sissy?’

  ‘The river,’ she splutters.

  ‘Look at you,’ Mother says, ‘you’re drowned.’

  ‘The river,’ she repeats.

  ‘What about the river?’

  ‘The river has taken Walter.’

  The body was not recovered for three days. It was driven downstream by the high winds and the tempestuous flood until it came to rest in a nest of fallen branches ten miles away, a ghastly fruit of the storm. Sissy sat up for two nights with Mother as the men searched for him. Gertie, big with her third child, came home, though her belly was like an insult. When Mother raised her head what she could see was a young, happy woman, blooming, five months gone. Papa sank into a stupor, for once not drink induced. He had not been prepared for Mother’s anger.

  ‘How could you?’ she yelled, pummelling him with her fists and clawing at his face.

  ‘How could you have left him alone? The river was in flood and you left him alone, a little boy.’

  Papa shielded his face with his hands and said nothing. Sissy had never seen him silent, beaten like this. But what could he have said? Everything Mother accused him of was true. His fecklessness, his sodden tempers had been clear to all but not to him. In those days and nights of waiting he seemed to shrink. His cruel inattention of many years was magnified by this one incident. He had abandoned his son, his bright silvery piece of a son. Mother railed against him. She roared at him in his absence – the bastard, the bastard! She spat if he came near.

  ‘You killed him,’ she said, ‘as surely as if you had driven a knife through his heart!’

  Sissy was mesmerised by the torrent of anger that came spilling from Mother’s lips. She who had always seemed so resigned, so defeated, was now breathing fire. Sissy was so persuaded by Mother’s grief that even she believed it was Papa who had stood on that slippery rock and with both hands pushed his son under and held him there, thrashing and gasping, throttling the life out of him. Only he would have the strength to do such a thing. Sissy was only a girl, after all, prone to weaknesses and fits of fancy and hysterical love. She could not have done it. She did not have the power.

  The doors and the windows are ajar. Every cupboard and box in the house is opened wide. Walter is laid out on a trestle in the kitchen in his sailor suit. There is a slight smile on his lips, a sure sign, Mrs Borkowska says, that he is already in heaven. When Sissy bends to kiss him goodbye she is sure he will still be wet, but he is dry and cold as a stone. She thinks of when he came, all raw and angry, and the gravity and silence of his going. He has returned to the distant place from whence he came. His boots are put in the coffin beside him and the comb Mother used to part his hair. Sissy places a painted egg by his side. Papa halts the pendulum of Grandmother’s clock. Time stands still.

  Culpeper, Virginia, November 1983

  HIGHWAY PATROLMAN FREDERICK (Foxy) Browne lazily dismounts and lifts off his globe of black. The radio on his bike crackles loudly. A station wagon is pulled up on the hard shoulder, an old model, listing to one side. Smoke is billowing from the open hood. The road is deserted, black top as far as the eye can see snaking through the leafy countryside, though the town is only five miles away. These folks may not know how close at hand help is. Foxy whips off his sunglasses and latches them onto the mouth of his top pocket. Automatica
lly he produces his little notepad. Misdemeanours are on his mind. He strolls up to the rear of the steaming car. He peers in through the driver’s window, which is rolled down half-way. Keys in the ignition, but no driver. An old dame is sitting in the passenger seat. She has a thatch of white hair and the flat, pursed leer of someone who has forgotten to put in her dentures. She is wearing what appears to be a man’s overcoat over a hospital gown of some description. Her blue-veined bare legs are thrust into a pair of furry slippers. In the back a blue wheelchair is folded, spokes glinting in the sun.

  ‘Ma’am,’ Foxy says, stooping at the open window and leaning his elbow on the roof of the car. ‘Are you alone?’

  She stares at him vacantly. Lights on, he thinks, nobody home.

  ‘Officer!’

  Foxy turns to find a burly, crew-cut man standing next to him. His fleshy face sports two sharp points – a large nose and the jutting precision of a widow’s peak. He is in shirt sleeves, an egg-stained necktie is slung loose over his chest. He has a soiled, dishevelled air.

  ‘Is everything all right here, sir?’ Foxy asks.

  ‘No, Officer, the radiator, I think …’ Another billow of hissing steam emanates from the engine, as if to endorse the driver’s diagnosis.

  ‘Well, sir, I can radio back for help. A patrol car could take you back to Culpeper. You’, he hesitates, ‘and your mother.’

  ‘My wife, Officer, actually.’

  Foxy blushes to his rusty roots.

  ‘Begging your pardon, ma’am,’ Foxy says, tipping his forelock rather than meet the driver’s eye. ‘And where are you folk heading to?’

  ‘Home,’ the old dame says thickly.

  ‘And where might that be?’

  ‘Charlottesville,’ the man replies.

  Foxy twigs immediately. The pair from University Circle, their house a pigsty by all accounts. The subject of several contentious court cases taken out by the long-suffering neighbours. The woman, the wife, is some eccentric European, thinks she’s royalty. Foxy has heard the stories. He knows too that the old lady has been reported missing from a hospital in Charlottesville. There’s been an APB out on them. The husband kidnapped her. Climbed a ladder to the second floor and literally carried her off. Like some god-damned fairy tale. They’ve been on the loose for three days, like a latter-day Bonnie and Clyde (thankfully unarmed, Foxy notes, as he pats his own holster reassuringly), careering round the county on a geriatric spree in a battered automobile that fits the description of the clapped-out vehicle perched on the camber. They’ve been spotted at a gas station in Petersburg, at a diner in Fredericksburg, a drive-in theatre in Richmond. And judging by the state of the interior, they’ve been sleeping in the car.

  ‘Mr Manahan,’ Foxy starts.

  ‘How did you know?’ Manahan interjects.

  ‘You have committed an illegal act. Kidnapping is a felony.’

  ‘Listen, Officer, I had to do that. My wife’, he says sotto voce, though the old bird seems hardly to register their conversation, ‘has a fear of being locked up. They put her in an asylum when she was a young woman, and the truth is she never recovered. They broke her spirit there. When she was committed to that institution, it brought all those awful memories flooding back. I couldn’t have that.’

  He pauses then and sighs.

  ‘Are you a married man, Officer?’ Manahan asks.

  Foxy nods assertively. ‘Yessir.’

  Foxy Browne is newly married and diverted by the novelty of his nuptial state. He thinks of Janice, her peachy skin, her candyfloss hair, the baby-dollness of her.

  ‘Well, then,’ Manahan says, clapping Foxy on the shoulder, ‘you know what it’s like to be separated from your beloved.’

  Reluctantly Foxy suspends his mild reverie.

  ‘We’ll have to take you in, sir.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Manahan says.

  ‘She’s a sick woman, sir, she should be in the hospital.’

  ‘The car,’ Manahan counters.

  ‘I can call for a patrol car.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand. My wife could not consent to travel in a police car. She’ll have to be towed.’

  Foxy is not sure if Manahan means his car, or his wife.

  ‘Hey, lady,’ Foxy says, hoping a slangy casual approach will defuse the situation. ‘Are you game for getting out?’

  The little woman, scarecrow figure, scarecrow hair, looks scared herself.

  ‘I have done nothing wrong,’ she says.

  Foxy radios in for help. The old lady sits grimly in the passenger seat while Manahan, face framed in the open window, pleads and cajoles and gesticulates at her.

  ‘It’s the uniform,’ Manahan explains, ‘maybe if you kept out of sight?’

  Foxy loiters behind the car, trying to look invisible, as Manahan gently opens the door.

  ‘They haven’t come for you, Princess, it’s all right, everything’s going to be all right.’

  The old dear swings her scraggy, mottled legs slowly out onto the tarmac.

  ‘Now, Officer,’ Manahan confides, man to man, ‘when she gets out she’ll expect to be treated with respect.’

  ‘Sure,’ Foxy says.

  ‘Real respect, I mean,’ Manahan reprimands him.

  ‘Oh yeh?’

  Just then two Culpeper patrol cars appear, slewing to a halt, lights flashing. A lot of manpower, Foxy thinks, for one little old lady.

  ‘You’ll have to kiss her hand,’ the old guy is saying.

  ‘Do what?’ Foxy guffaws in disbelief.

  ‘She’s a grand duchess, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolayevna,’ Manahan hisses.

  ‘And what does that make you?’ Foxy asks loudly as Manahan, struggling, is bundled into the back of one police car and his wife, unprotesting, is led to another. ‘The King? Ain’t you heard, pal? The King is dead.’

  Note

  Anastasia Manahan died on 12 February 1984 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Franziska Schanzkowska disappeared in Berlin in early 1920. Officially, her fate remains unknown.

  Poland was partitioned three times during the eighteenth century and was divided between Prussia, Austria and Russia. After the formation of the German Reich in 1871, the part of Poland where Franziska Schanzkowska grew up was under German rule.

  For clarity’s sake, I have not used the diminutive and intimate form for first names, commonly employed in Polish and Russian. For place names in Poland, I have chosen modern Polish versions, though many of these would have been Germanified in the period in question.

  Acknowledgements

  For their loyalty and support, thanks to David Cutler, Orla Murphy, Margaret Mulvihill, Joanne Carroll, Marian Fitzgibbon and Rosemary Boran. For their practical help and advice, thanks to Nancy Quinlan, Jann Tchak, Krystoff Schramm, Marian Nowakowsky, Beata Kozak, Thomas Überhoff, Gwynn Baylis and Séamus Martin. A special word of thanks must go to the Lannan Foundation for a literature award which recognised my previous work and aided in the writing of this book.

  I read a great deal of work, both fiction and non-fiction, in the preparation of this book but the following titles were invaluable:

  Song, Dance and Customs of Peasant Poland, by Sula Benet (AMS Press, New York, 1951); Victory Must Be Ours (Germany in the Great War 1914–18), by Laurence Moyer (Leo Cooper, London, 1995); Munition Lasses, by A.K. Foxwell (Hodder and Stoughton, 1917); The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980, by Elaine Showalter (Virago, 1987); Reading Berlin, 1900, by Peter Fritzsche (Harvard University Press, 1998); Anastasia: The Life of Anna Anderson, by Peter Kurth (Pimlico, 1995); The Last Empress: The Life and Times of Alexandra Feodorovna, Tsarina of Russia, by Greg King (Citadel Press, New York, 1996); Fabergé Eggs: Masterpieces from Czarist Russia, by Susanna Pfeffer (Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, Inc, 1990)

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted
in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781473524873

  Version 1.0

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  VINTAGE

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  Jonathan Cape is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  Copyright © Mary Morrissy 2000

  Mary Morrissy has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published by Jonathan Cape in 2000

  www.vintage-books.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 9781784703790