When, a few minutes later, they were walking down the broad staircase that led to the reception area, Nora was searching the faces of the people she could see standing or sitting around the lobby. They all looked quite still and lifeless.
Mother and daughter had ordered their food and were holding their glasses of water, looking round the large restaurant, when the feeling of their hotel room came back. Nora felt she could ask her mother anything she liked at this moment.
“Why did you agree with Daddy to come and live in this country?”
“Because it’s a wonderful step in his career. And it’s a new experience for us.”
“I know. But what about you? Don’t you mind?”
“I’m your mother, your daddy’s wife. So naturally I go where he goes.”
“Have you always done what he wanted?”
“Well, it’s what we do when we’re married. And your daddy is such a good husband and a wonderful father.”
Nora had heard this general explanation many times before. They were silent for a few moments. The waiter arrived with a glass of wine for the mother and a coke for the daughter. They both took a sip from their drinks before Nora asked her next question.
“I know he’s a good daddy, but what makes him such a good husband for you?”
“He’s so reliable, and he has such high standards. You know, he went through a terrible time in his young days. That’s taught him his high principles.”
“You mean that’s why he’s often so strict with us?”
“He’s only what you call strict when he feels he has to defend important moral principles. He has seen such awful things in his life, but he believes in the good roots in us.”
“What’s it got to do with good roots and high moral principles when he forbids us to wear fashionable clothes, I’d like to know?” Nora remembered the conflict she’d had with her father only two weeks ago. It had been one of those rare occasions when she forgot her good manners and shouted at her parents. She still believed they didn’t want her to look too good in fashionable outfits. They probably feared she might look too grown-up, and they wanted to keep her in eternal childhood.
“Oh, that was only the material you wanted. It was what they call camouflage.”
“And what was wrong with that?”
“You know your father doesn’t want his daughters to walk around in military outfits.”
“It’s not military, it’s a fashion!”
“You know your father’s standards. Because he’s been in the war and he’s seen such awful things, he’s against military equipment, and he thinks it’s immoral to wear such stuff just for fashion’s sake. A soldier’s uniform is worn for the purpose of killing people. Camouflage is a killer’s outfit.”
“You know that’s ridiculous.”
“I respect your father’s moral standards, and I want you to do the same. Please, don’t go against your father in such things. We can call ourselves very fortunate to have such a model of a man at the head of our family.”
Their food arrived. The steaks were hard and dry, something they had been warned about before leaving the States. All their friends and neighbours who had visited England before had told them about the awful food they would get there. Nora wondered what the food would be like in her new school. The business of cutting up their steaks and loading their forks with chips - which Nora still called French fries - and tasteless watery vegetables kept them silent for a while.
“You see, Nora dear,” the mother began, looking into the middle distance with wet eyes, “when I met your father he was still suffering very much under his awful experiences. He must have experienced terrible things and seen lots of suffering in the war. He must have been very fortunate to have survived such horrors. It was in Chicago, back in 1954, only nine years after the war. We were both looking out over the lake on a cool but sunny day. I was with my Aunt Sally, and he was on his own, munching a sandwich for his lunch, when we happened to look at each other. I was immediately taken with him, such a handsome man. He was the first to say something. I was far too shy. I’d come to the big city from my small town, Davenport, Iowa. I can’t remember what he said, but despite Aunt Sally, we managed to arrange to meet again.”
“You never told me that bit. What was it like for you to come to Chicago from Davenport?”
“Oh, it was just fantastic. Davenport was so provincial, and Chicago was the world. As a young woman, I was simply overwhelmed. The big shops, the traffic, the fashions, the concerts and theatres, the people...”
“So Dad was part of this new experience?”
“In a way, yes. We fell in love at once. Looking back now, I think what made him so attractive for me, besides his dashing good looks and the ironic twinkle in his eyes, was his sadness. The sadness he was carrying inside himself after what he’d seen in the war. It gave him a slightly mysterious look, which I found very romantic. And then there was his funny accent.”
“Yes, it’s German, isn’t it?”
“It’s Swiss German, he insists on this detail. You know that.”
“Yes,” Nora admitted, “but we’ve never talked about it, have we?”
“What more is there to be said?”
“Well, for one thing, I often wondered why Daddy could have been in the war if he grew up in Switzerland. The Swiss weren’t in the war. We had that in our history lesson.”
“He didn’t grow up there. He had to escape from the Nazis in Germany, so he came to Switzerland as a refugee.”
“Why doesn’t he like to talk about it? Whenever we ask him about his past in Europe he says it’s all too awful. He must have seen things that we have to learn about in our history lessons today. Why can’t he tell us more?”
“It’s because some of the things are just too bad. He doesn’t want to talk about them.”
“But when you first got together in 1954, you must have asked him things about his past. I wouldn’t marry a man whose past I knew nothing about.”
“Why do you keep on? Why do you insist on those distant things?”
“It’s just that we’ve never been told as children. I’d like to know more. Do you know the details of his escape from the Nazis? Was he really in a concentration camp? How long did he live in Switzerland before he came to the States?”
“Come on, finish your vegetables.” This was the end of the little tête-à-tête discussion between mother and daughter. Nora knew it was no use trying to get her mother back to the topic once it had been closed like this.
The next morning, they went for a stroll around the neighbourhood of their hotel. They saw Hyde Park and Marble Arch, Oxford Street and Regent Street. There were lots of shops and lots of people. It was a cool but pleasant March morning. When they got back to the hotel, the receptionist handed them a telegram.
“Oh, Dad’s not coming for another two days,” the mother said when she had read the telegram. “He’s being kept in Boston a bit longer than expected.” She folded up the telegram and slid it in her handbag.
The new situation gave them two more days of togetherness as mother and daughter. They decided to take a sight-seeing tour around London to make the most of their first day. When they got tired of following their guide - a young woman with a bright red umbrella as a beacon - they sat down on a bench and told her they’d make their own way back to the hotel. This was in the park at Hampton Court Palace. They looked at the early daffodils that surrounded them.
“We saw this place in a film back in the States,” Nora began. It was about Henry VIII and his wives. I think I remember that the king took the palace from the archbishop and gave it to his young wife, you know, the one he had beheaded only a few years later. Did you know that?”
“No, I don’t know a great deal about British history. In fact, I don’t know too much about history at all. Back in I
owa, all we learnt about in our history classes was the Boston Tea Party and the Declaration of Independence and all that. There wasn’t a lot about European history. Of course, we knew a few English kings and queens, and we knew about Henry VIII and his wives, but no details, and that was about it. I was never any good at history.”
“But meeting Dad you must have learnt a lot about recent history, the war, the Nazis, Hitler, Stalin and all that?”
“Not much. Only what he told me about his own experiences, and as you know that wasn’t very much.”
“I know,” Nora agreed. “And I know, as you told me yesterday, he doesn’t like to talk about it. But can you tell me what you know? I think I’m old enough to know.”
“Well, my child,” her mother hesitated, “as I told you last night, I met your father in 1954. He told me he’d grown up somewhere in Germany, I don’t remember the name of the place. When Hitler and the Nazis came to power he was in danger because he was a Socialist. So one day, after he’d fought for them in the war for more than three years, they suddenly arrested him. They were going to deport him to a concentration camp, when he managed to escape. He told me how he walked all the way to freedom. He had to walk at night and sleep in barns and haystacks during the day, to avoid being caught by the Nazis. Anyway, eventually he got to Switzerland, where he got political asylum. Then, a few years later, he came to the States.”
“Did they give him his tattoo in prison, you know the one on his left arm?”
“Yes. All the people they sent to their concentration camps were tattooed like that. But how do you know? Have you seen his tattoo? It’s not very clear. In fact, it’s hardly visible, just those two letters inside his arm. I think he tried to get it off, but tattoos can’t be removed so easily. To me it’s obvious he hates it.”
“Of course, I’ve seen it. When I asked him one day he said it wasn’t for little girls, but it reminded him of our duty to respect all humans. So, it must remind him of his bad days in the Nazi prison.”
“Oh, come on, Nora. Let’s walk over there. I’d like to look at those flowers.” Mother steered them away from their bench and from their topic.
On their second day in London, they went to have a look at pictures in the National Gallery, which Nora found rather boring. In the afternoon, they took a boat down the river and visited the Maritime Museum at Greenwich. It was an exhausting day. So they went to bed early. The topic of Dad’s past in Europe was never mentioned again.
* * *
Nora was sitting on her bed, her mother was at the small writing table in their bright hotel room, when the telephone on the bedside-table rang. It was a call from the lobby to inform them of the arrival of Dad and Margaret. Shortly afterwards, they were all together, hugging and kissing, happy about their reunion. Nora moved to the next room, together with her sister, while Dad moved in with Mum.
After lunch downstairs, the parents retired to their room, but the two sisters decided to go for a walk in Hyde Park. The weather wasn’t as bright as in the morning, but it was dry, and the grey atmosphere suited the girls’ melancholy. They were both a little insecure about what to make of their new lives in this strange country.
They had a lot to tell each other. Margaret told Nora about her time in Connecticut and about Boston. Then they fell silent.
Sitting on a park bench near the Serpentine, Nora began to open the new topic she had discovered in conversation with her mother the other day. “Did you talk a lot to Dad?”
“Well, yes. We had a lot of time to talk. He told me lots of interesting things about his new job in Newcastle.”
“Did you talk about his past?”
“Why about his past?”
“Did you never wonder why we hardly know anything about our own father? What he was before he met Mum?”
“Wasn’t he a German refugee originally? Then he was in business in Switzerland before he came to the States. I think he became an American citizen a few years before he met Mum. Why do you want to know?”
“Don’t you want to know more?”
“Why should I? He’s our dad and we love him. Isn’t that enough?”
“Well, yes, but... I don’t know, it’s just that...,” Nora faltered.
“What do you mean? Is there anything wrong? Did you have a row with him or what? What’s wrong if he doesn’t like talking about his time in a Nazi prison?”
“You’re right. You know I love him, too. And I admire him as much as you do, for his high moral principles, for what he does for us, for Mum, for other people and so on. But, ... well, I may be wrong, but there are these moments. Sometimes, when I’m not with Dad, when I’m separated from him and just thinking of him, I have the impression he’s not really my father, he’s some stranger, some person that I don’t really know.”
“Oh, my little sister! These are just the shifting moods of puberty. I was like that, too, when I was your age. Don’t worry, it’ll pass.”
“Oh, please, don’t talk down from the high horse. You’re not all that older, Margaret.”
“Three years make a big difference at our age, believe me. I know. I’ve been through it all.” With these soothing words, Margaret took her sister in her arms.
After their embrace, the sisters forgot their discussion about their father, and turned their attention to what they could do in London. They expected to have another two or three days in this grey city. Margaret suggested Madame Tussaud’s for an outing the next day, and Nora agreed with pleasure. She had read that there were not only wax figures of famous politicians as well as English kings and queens, but also of Elvis and the Beatles. That might be good fun.
They walked some more through the park, and when they reached the gate that led them out onto the pavement of Bayswater Road, the sky opened up and the sun peeped out from between the clouds. With the wind easing off a little, it became quite pleasant. It was a pity about the noise, Nora thought. In the park, they had heard the twitter of birdsong, but here the traffic noise drowned it all. And to add to the noise, a big aeroplane on its approach to Heathrow came roaring quite low over the park.
Artists were exhibiting their works along the iron park fence. The sisters looked at some of the pictures. Even though they didn’t think much of them in terms of artistic standards, they were touched by some of them. It was an agreeable afternoon, they had to admit. The better ones among the paintings certainly worked wonders and lifted Nora’s spirits considerably. Especially one picture of a northern landscape appealed to her. The artist had managed to compose the setting and match the sombre colours in such a way as to render the bleak landscape in a light which wasn’t altogether void of a certain hidden cheerfulness. Or was it rather confidence and assurance?
It took the girls nearly an hour to get back to their hotel.
Next day, they visited Madame Tussaud’s, and on the following days they mainly went shopping with their mother. Three days later, they boarded the train from King’s Cross to Newcastle.
Looking out of the window of the train speeding through the flat landscape, Nora lost herself in her thoughts about what had happened between her and her mother in London. The more she thought about what Mum had told her about Dad’s past, the more blank spaces appeared in her image of her father.
At her former school in Chicago, history had mainly consisted of an enumeration of the glorious aspects of American history, such as the War of Independence, the early years of the independent states, the victorious conquest of the West up to Little Big Horn, the victory of the North over the South which sealed the abolition of slavery, the rise of the country to the leading industrial nation in the world and finally America’s great roles in the two World Wars. They had to learn by heart some of the most important sections of the Constitution and even some of its Amendments. And, of course, they had to memorize the names and dates of office of all the American Presiden
ts. European history, on the other hand, remained mostly blank, except for some of the horrors committed by the Germans in the two wars, and Hitler’s perverted mind and aggressions were treated at length. Nora found herself hoping that she would learn a lot more about Europe, now that they were going to settle here, and history was one of her favourite subjects. Once she knew more about the whole Nazi era, she would explore a lot more about her father’s life.
The flat country that she was staring at was very bleak.
Seven
The language was the worst shock. Nora was worried she might never understand these people. They all appeared extremely friendly and warm-hearted, but their language was utterly incomprehensible. It wasn’t really English, Nora and Margaret thought.
“I was wond’ring if your hinny could mind the bairns on Saturdeeah,” Mrs Henderson asked. She was their next-door neighbour. Mother had to ask back twice before she understood the smiling woman.
“Of course, Nora will be happy to do some baby-sitting for you, Mrs Henderson,” she replied.
“Why-ay, that’s canny,” was Mrs Henderson’s comment.
When the door had been closed behind Mrs Henderson, who was walking down their garden path, Nora asked her mother what the friendly woman had wanted.
“She wants you to do some baby-sitting for her. Look after her two children on Saturday. They want to go out, and she’d be so happy if you could do that. She’ll give you a whole pound. That’s very generous. So, I said you’d be happy to oblige. Was I right?”
“Yes, Mummy, that’s ok. But I wish you’d ask me first.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I was so overwhelmed by her language. It was such an effort to understand her, so I completely forgot to ask you first.”
White Lies Page 11
