by Sue Gee
Christopher looked away for a minute. ‘That’s right. He’s financing a desulphurisation unit, isn’t he? But Wilkendorf & Scheiber are small fry, nothing on Hugh’s scale. Anyway –’ Ash fell to the ground; he rubbed at it with his foot. ‘Can I get you another coffee?’
‘No, no, I’m fine, thanks.’
‘I think I might go and get a beer.’
‘Of course.’ She watched him go back into the house and sat thinking. Christopher talked like someone who knew his way around – he clearly did know his way around, he’d been coming to Berlin for years. He was, it would seem, doing well. Then why the shoestring trip on the train, the constant references to being short of money – needing a cheap hotel in the Eighties, needing a discount now?
‘Mum,’ said Marsha. ‘I’m starving.’
‘Even after that enormous breakfast?’
‘That was hours ago.’
Harriet looked at her watch. So it was.
‘I’m hungry, too.’ Christopher had returned, and was stubbing his cigarette out on the wall. He flicked it away to a corner and Marsha watched with distaste. He saw her expression and laughed. ‘Nice people don’t do that.’ She looked away in embarrassment. ‘Oh, come on, I’m only teasing. Let’s go in and see what they can do for us.’
Marsha looked at Harriet. ‘Can’t we eat out here?’
‘Marsha –’
‘We could do,’ said Christopher, and they did. Herr Scheiber put a cloth on a table beneath the apple tree. He brought out a platter of cheeses, a basket of rye bread, a bowl of fruit. He gave Marsha a Coke, and Christopher another beer and Harriet a small carafe of wine, and they sat eating and drinking and watching cat and kittens fall asleep in the sun. It could hardly have been more delightful, and Harriet said so, adding, with a glass of wine inside her and in an unthinking moment, that in two days’time it was Marsha’s birthday.
‘Is it really?’ Christopher reached for the cheeses. ‘In that case we must celebrate. How old will you be, Marsha?’
‘Ten,’ said Marsha, and gazed fixedly at the kittens. Harriet kicked herself.
Christopher said: ‘I’m sorry, how presumptuous of me. I’m sure you have your own plans …’ He dug his knife into a drooling piece of Brie. ‘Who’d like a bit of this?’
The moment passed; it grew hotter. Even in the dappled shade of the apple tree sweat trickled down Christopher’s forehead. He wiped it away, and leaned back against his chair, where his jacket was hung. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, a pale striped green; there was no concealing now, as he lifted his arms behind his head, yawning, the bulge of his stomach – bare freckled skin visible, even, between two straining buttons. Marsha reached for an orange.
‘Coffee?’ he asked Harriet. ‘We could have it inside.’
‘Yes, that would be nice.’
One of the kittens was mewing; Marsha turned, and picked it up. ‘I want to stay out here.’
‘Okay.’
Harriet finished a peach. Christopher picked up his cigarettes and lighter.
‘Right,’ he said, rising. ‘Let’s go.’
She followed him into the house.
The dining room which Harriet had glimpsed from the hall faced on to the street. Herr Scheiber had closed the shutters, or almost closed them, and shafts of afternoon sunlight slanted into the room, spinning with dust. There were only five or six tables, and only two other guests, a couple of businessmen, cradling brandies. The bird in the glass case, some kind of hawk, glared from a mossy branch as they went past the sideboard. Bottles and decanters clinked at their footsteps.
‘That bird doesn’t like me,’ said Christopher, leading the way. ‘Can’t think why.’
They sat at a table between the windows. Coffee was brought in by a girl they had seen in the kitchen, and served on a little red tray.
‘Scheiber’s granddaughter,’ said Christopher, when he had thanked her; she went over to the two men in the corner, who were asking for the bill. He sat back, and lit another cigarette, watching Harriet pour. Smoke drifted in and out of the shafts of sunlight. ‘Well,’ he said slowly. ‘Here we are again.’
‘Indeed.’ Harriet put down the jug and looked at him. She waved away smoke. ‘How many do you have a day?’
‘Too many. I’ve tried to give up and I can’t. One of the few pleasures left to me.’
‘Dear, dear.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘You realise you’re running a terrible risk.’
‘What with my weight and all.’ He inhaled again, more deeply. ‘Too bad. Who cares?’ He raised his coffee cup. ‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers.’
The businessmen at the corner table were pulling out wallets, signing for credit cards, leaving a tip. Harriet was aware of these sounds, but she was also thinking of another table; in the dining room in Brussels, as the sky beyond the window grew dark; of Christopher leaning across to light a cigarette in one of the candles reflected in the polished surface, narrowing his eyes in the light. ‘They’re sexy as hell, and they kill you,’ he’d said to Susanna. Did he really not care?
The two men got up to go; Scheiber’s granddaughter saw them to the door with a smile. Out in the street, footsteps went past the shuttered windows, and voices faded. The girl came back and cleared their glasses and coffee cups; then she was gone.
Harriet looked at Christopher, smoking, watching her. She became acutely aware of the quietness and emptiness of the room, the whiteness of the linen, the stillness broken by the spinning dust in the beams of light. She, who was always busy, always moving quickly on to what came next, on impulse wanted to stretch out her arms, to open herself – to the place, the space, the atmosphere it contained, and she felt as if all this were all of a sudden narrowing: forced, like the light at the gap in the shutters, into something with a timeless intensity: a single, unforgettable moment, on which you might look back for the rest of your life, thinking: then. That’s when it was.
‘Harriet?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are you thinking?’
‘I suppose,’ she said carefully, ‘I’m thinking about you.’
‘Yes?’
They looked at each other; Harriet looked away. The stillness of the room possessed her; she looked back; she said, as though something were making her say it, ‘Tell me about your wife.’
‘My ex-wife.’
‘Yes.’
He stubbed out his cigarette in a thin, beaten metal ashtray, the kind of thing you never saw in England now – something else which seemed uniquely to belong to this room, this moment.
‘My wife was – my wife is –’ He shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them, looking beyond her. ‘Susanna knows about my wife, but it’s a long story.’
She felt her stomach contract.
Footsteps crossed the hall, came in through the open doorway. The bottles on the sideboard clinked.
‘You’re being an awfully long time,’ said Marsha. ‘Can we go swimming now?’
The swimming pool was set within a modern housing complex in Ernst Thälmann Park, on the other side of Dimitroff Strasse, a busy thoroughfare to the north of the hotel. They crossed at the lights. Petrol fumes shimmered in the heat and Christopher wiped his brow.
‘I’ll be glad to get in the water, won’t you, Marsha?’
‘Yes.’ She had not wanted to get in the water with Christopher, that had been abundantly clear to Harriet as the three of them sat in the shuttered dining room making plans. Marsha’s legs swung beneath the table; she kicked Harriet, sharply, when Christopher had suggested accompanying them to show them the way. Harriet frowned at her, with almost equal sharpness, feeling what she did not often feel with Marsha: a real resentment. The moment of stillness had been taken away, the moment of revelation postponed. Was she never to have adult company without interruption? Marsha looked hurt; Harriet felt guilty.
Now, Marsha said to her: ‘It won’t be like this in Prague, will it?’
‘What do you mean?’ And please don�
��t say, under your breath, ‘He won’t be with us, will he?’ willed Harriet, following Christopher’s stride along the pavement.
‘So hot all the time.’
‘Oh. No, I shouldn’t think so.’
‘And he won’t be with us all the time, will he?’
Harriet almost smacked her. Unheard of. ‘Ssh!’
‘He can’t hear us.’
Christopher turned and slowed for them to catch up. ‘Almost there.’
The entrance to the little park was dominated by a gigantic piece of sculpture: a head and clenched fist, sprayed violently with graffiti.
‘That’s not Marx,’ said Marsha.
‘No. But Thälmann was an important communist figure in the thirties. The Nazis murdered him, and this thing was put up in his memory after the war.’ He nodded towards the graffiti. ‘He seems to have fallen out of favour again.’
Skateboarders swooped in the sun up and down the concrete slopes beyond the statue; well-kept high-rise blocks rose from well-kept greenery.
‘This was a sort of GDR showpiece,’ said Christopher. ‘Something smart and modern amidst the tenements: something to aspire to. Not that many tenement-dwellers were rehoused here – I think you had to be one of the card-carrying elite to get one of these apartments. It’s all a bit luxurious in its way –’ He was guiding them through the skateboarders, at whom Marsha glanced with longing, and up shallow steps to a precinct of shops and restaurants. ‘Hence, everything on tap – even nurseries, I think, no doubt with pictures of Ulbricht and Honecker on the walls. Hence the swimming pool. Mind you, it’s pretty basic – don’t expect a wave machine or anything, Marsha.’
‘I don’t like wave machines anyway.’
The entrance to the pool was on the far side of the precinct. Inside, they found green and white tiles, a bored-looking girl behind glass. Shrieks and splashes sounded from beyond swing doors.
Christopher paid for them.
‘I thought you were broke,’ said Harriet.
‘Not that broke.’
They made their way to separate changing rooms. The women’s was high and echoing, with scuffed green doors to the cubicles and an old-fashioned, bathhouse feel to them.
‘Marsha,’ said Harriet, as they went in.
‘What?’ she asked guardedly.
‘Can you just try? He’s giving us a lovely day. Think of the lunch. Think of the kittens.’
‘He talked about drowning.‘
‘Oh, come on – he wasn’t serious, it’s just his manner.’
Marsha went into an empty cubicle and locked the door. ‘How come,’ she asked through the plywood division, ‘how come you like him so much all of a sudden?’
‘I didn’t say I did like him so much.’ Harriet locked her own door, and hung her own bag on the hook.
‘You don’t need to say,’ called Marsha.
Harriet did not answer.
When they had changed, and put their clothes into a battered locker, they went through a footbath and out to the pool, which was crowded. Municipal green and white tiles lined the walls, and the pool itself, so that the atmosphere was less of summer-blue skies, as they were used to in London, and more of a steamy pond. Children bobbed about in the shallow end; three or four teenage boys raced along the side, whistled at sharply by a lifeguard with an earring. They leapt into the water, laughing. Adults swam up and down marked lanes. Harriet looked for Christopher.
‘There he is.’ She saw a large figure in pale blue boxer trunks at the far end, sitting on the edge with his legs in the water, a towel slung over his shoulder. He looked overweight and out of place, and as she watched him survey the swimmers, she wondered that he had chosen to bring them here, and was touched by his consideration for a child in a hot city. He turned, looking around; he saw her watching him and raised his hand, getting awkwardly to his feet. His stomach bulged over his waistband, his shoulders were fleshy and full. His legs were long and straight and he towered over everyone, but it was clear, as he came up the side towards them, that he didn’t quite know where to look.
‘I’m going in.’ Marsha dropped gracefully into the shallow end in a gap between toddlers, and struck out. A strong swimmer, taken to their local pool by Harriet since babyhood, she was soon halfway down, avoiding the noisy group of boys.
Christopher and Harriet moved towards each other: she, more than anything, to save him from having to continue his ill-at-ease approach. He smiled down at her, approving her plain black swimsuit.
‘You look good.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Well.’ He gave a short, embarrassed laugh. ‘Shall we swim?’
He dropped his towel on the ledge running alongside the pool, and they walked back down to the deep end. Children jumped in wildly; Marsha had turned, and was coming back again, sleek and straight.
‘She’s good.’
‘Not bad. Better than I was at her age. I still have to go in down the steps.’
‘Do you really?’
They had reached the end; she crouched by the top of the metal rung, and watched him walk round, and stand for a moment on the edge, waiting for a space amongst the swimmers in the lane beneath him. He ran a hand through his hair, raised heavy arms, and lifted his enormous body weight on to the balls of his feet. He plunged, and then she could see why he’d brought them. He was extraordinary: powerful and smooth, moving through the water like an animal, taking possession of it in a steady, rhythmic crawl, reaching the far end and turning without a pause. He was coming back down towards her; he hauled himself up on the side again, gasping.
Harriet gave him a clap. ‘You’re a pro.’
‘Not enough puff.’
‘Too much puffing.’
‘True.’ He wiped the water from his eyes and smiled, coming to join her.
‘Aren’t you going in?’
She swished her feet. ‘In a minute. Here’s Marsha.’ She watched her daughter’s approach. ‘Did you see Christopher swim?’
‘Yes.’ Marsha held on to the edge of the railing. ‘Aren’t you coming in?’
‘I am, I am.’ Harriet slipped down the steps and struck out. And Marsha swam alongside, as he did in London, as she had done since she was small. Harriet usually enjoyed this companionship, and the feeling of achievement: she had given a skill to her child, and now they could share it. But in London there were often other children, or Harriet’s own friends; she and Marsha could come and go from each other. Here, now, it felt as though Marsha were clinging, deliberately drawing her into an exclusive twosome. And again, with a pang of guilt – they were in a strange place, in a foreign city; they knew no one except for Christopher, of course Marsha clung – she thought: can’t I have time to myself?
Up at the shallow end a few little girls were playing with an inflatable ball. They were younger than Marsha, seven or eight, but they looked happy and carefree, and as the ball made an arc through the air and landed in the lane beside her, Harriet, picking it up, said: ‘Why don’t you join them?’
‘They don’t speak English.’
‘So? You don’t have to speak German to play catch.’ Harriet lifted the ball above her head and threw it across the markers to the furthest child, who leapt up, and threw it back, laughing. Harriet passed it to Marsha. ‘Go on.’
‘You just want to get rid of me.’
‘Don’t be so silly. I want you to have fun with other children.’
‘I don’t know them.’
‘You’re usually so sociable.’
The circle of little girls was waiting, listening to this exchange between foreigners. One of them bobbed up and down, waving.
‘Her wesen! Her wesen!’
‘That means throw it over here. Go on – throw it. Go and play.’
‘Oh, all right.’ Marsha threw, and ducked under the markers. She came up next to the circle of children, and stood there, waiting her turn. Harriet, with a mixture of guilt and relief, watched for a moment, then swam away.
Chr
istopher was standing at the edge of the deep end, watching her approach. Harriet swam slowly, not acknowledging this, trying to concentrate on her steady breast stroke, on avoiding the other swimmers. Were she and Christopher going to swim together? How would that feel? Shrieks and shouting echoed all around her: in this public, crowded place, those charged, still moments in the empty dining room felt distant and dreamlike. She longed to recapture them.
Was that true?
It was true.
She wanted – oh, how she wanted – to be seated opposite this man again, to feel his gaze upon her, to return it, to sense between them – what? What was between them now?
Susanna knows about my wife, but it’s a long story –
What did that mean?
Someone coming the other way bumped into her; Harriet moved aside, and looked up. Christopher Pritchard, tall and heavy and almost naked, was still on the edge of the deep end, waiting.
You could only swim so slowly. Harriet, more than halfway down the pool, swam slowly on, thinking, as she had not thought for a long time, of other naked bodies she had known. Not many. Not Karel’s, so long and lean and beautiful, so much desired. There had been Martin’s, well-made and compact and – yes, it was true – often turned away from her. One or two others before him, one or two others since. None of them, at this moment, seemed to have mattered much.
The body Harriet knew best was Marsha’s – slender and straight and boylike. As for her own …
She had come to the end of the pool. Above her, Christopher was lowering himself, slipping into the water beside her. ‘Marsha seems happy.’
‘Does she?’ Harriet turned, holding on to the edge with one hand. Down in the shallows the circle of children had widened, and Marsha, the tallest, was in the middle, throwing the bright striped ball and laughing. Guilt evaporated, and with it came a sense of freedom. She was, after all, doing what a child should be doing.
Christopher said: ‘Will you have supper with me tonight?’
‘That would be nice. But Marsha –’
‘We don’t have to eat late. Scheiber’s got a sitting room – she could stay in there with the cats.’ He looked at her questioningly. ‘Does that sound all right?’
