“Sorry, I didn’t get where. Where does she want to meet you?”
“Wednesday.”
“Yes, but where?”
“Fiona, I said. On Wednesday.”
Situations like this were so frequent that the idea hit him that she might have a problem with her hearing. But he found out that it couldn’t be the problem, her hearing often proved to be excellent. So it had to be her intellect.
Over the months, Andrew learned to live with this. It was a small price to pay for being with such a lovely woman, after all. And weren’t all love-relationships a challenge? And, to top it all, the sex they had was so satisfying. He truly believed he’d won the jackpot when it came to finding his ideal partner for life. The sex, yes, the sex was so overwhelmingly fantastic.
By the time he walked up to his mother’s front door, after work, he had sufficiently recovered from his morning’s sexual earthquake to focus on what his mother might have to discuss with him.
“I wanted to talk to you, but now I find it difficult to begin,” his mother admitted. “You see, it’s not easy. I have been in two minds about it for quite some time. Should I involve you, yes or no? And if so, when was the right time?”
“Don’t say anything unless you really mean it,” Andrew warned. “Don’t say things you might regret afterwards.”
“Oh, it’s not that, my dear. I won’t regret anything. It’s only that I don’t know when you will be ready for it. How will it affect you if I involve you too early?”
“Please, Mum, don’t speak in riddles. I’m a big boy, and you know you can trust me with everything, even if you’re going to tell me you’ve had a career as a chain-saw murderer.” He thought this exaggeration could lighten the mood, but he was wrong. It was the wrong thing to say, he realized at once.
“I’m sorry, I was just–”
“I know. I’m sorry if I can’t joke about these things. They’re too serious.”
Mother and son went on beating about the bush for a while. Eventually, after a short moment of silence, she took a deep breath and said, “It’s that awful man, Wolfgang, again.”
“Now you’ll have to explain,” Andrew begged.
Then it was time for the truth. For the first time in her life, Nora White, née Woolf, who had always been such a strong woman, became a humble narrator of events beyond her control. She began to tell her son Andrew a story that was bound to affect his life as much as it had affected hers for so many years.
“You may remember, we used to talk about people who must have known my father, your granddad that is, in his young days. And in that context, you might have heard of a man called Wolfgang. What you probably don’t know is that Wolfgang tried to blackmail your granddad through the 1980s. But you know that I went to Germany in 1996.”
“Yes, I know. And I probably guessed more than you may think. You know that I’m also interested in the past. Just like you. And I’m equally intrigued by what happened in the last war, especially in Germany. Also, Granddad sometimes says very strange things when he’s so puzzled in his mind. He keeps on about having done bad things, but I can’t make head or tail of it.”
“There you are. This is the point. Are you ready to take my old diary and read it when it suits you?”
Andrew looked at his mother. With her question she gave him such a wonderful proof of her confidence in him. Was he worthy of such unconditional trust?
He realized that she might expect him to show some surprise, but he didn’t want to be too enthusiastic either.
“Your diary?” he only asked.
“Indeed. There’s only one problem,” his mother said. “I can’t find it. I know it must be somewhere, either in the attic or in the garage. I’m sure it isn’t anywhere among our books or our documents. So I’ll have to look for it. Only, at the time I simply haven’t got the energy.”
“Oh, you’ll find it. I’m confident. Or do you want me to help you?”
“No, I prefer to find it myself.”
“Perhaps Dad might know where it is,” Andrew suggested.
Nora hesitated before she answered. “Your father doesn’t even know this diary exists. He knows about my trip to Germany, of course. But I never told him everything. I only told him the more pleasant stories about my time over there. He knows I went to trace my father’s past, and he asked me a few general questions, but he has no idea of the depth of my enquiry. I also did tell him that my father had changed his name twice after the war, but he wasn’t really interested in the details. George said he married Nora Woolf and made her into Mrs White, and that was enough for him. He could never understand or even support my interest in my father’s past.”
“So, it’s a thing between you and me?”
“Absolutely. That’s why I want you to read my diary when the time is right. Oh yes, Margaret knows about the diary, too.”
“Has she read it?”
“Of course not. She hasn’t even seen it. I only told her in a moment of weakness shortly after my return from Germany. We both got a bit tipsy one evening when we were on our own. George was away on business and Helen was with her parents in Northumberland. So we spent a sisterly evening together, first at the Pilot and later back here. I can’t tell you how much we had, but the bottles of Pinot Grigio lost their contents pretty quickly. It was just one of those evenings. We both felt so relaxed and free, and very close as sisters. We’ve never felt like that again. Anyway, that’s when I confided in her. I told her about the diary. She’s never asked me about it, and it has never been mentioned between us again. So, there you are. Margaret knows but doesn’t seem to be so interested in it.”
“And what about that Wolfgang man?”
“Well, that... That’s another problem. He called here a few days ago, he was at the door. I was alone, and he gave me quite a fright. You know, he’s an octogenarian but looks a lot younger, quite threatening. The vulgar type of an ugly German, if you know what I mean.”
“What did he want?”
“Guess what. Money.”
“I can see. But what do you expect me to do?”
“Well, I was hoping you might have an idea of what to do, how to react to the fellow’s demands.”
Andrew was silent for a few minutes, while his mother went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. When the kettle was boiling she asked him if he wanted a cup, too, and he said yes, please. Then they sat down together in the living-room again.
After they’d had their first sips Andrew came to a decision.
“Here’s my suggestion, Mum. You do your best to find that diary. How can I decide what to do if I don’t know the full story? Whatever that man knows, it can’t be all that bad. If he contacts you again, just put him off. Invent some story about ill health or so, just put him off. Let him think there might be some money if only he’ll be patient enough. Meanwhile I will think of an appropriate strategy.”
Nora sighed and nodded.
Back at home, Andrew gave the matter a great deal of thought. He told Rebecca that his mother wanted him to help her. He gave her a rough outline of the problem, playing it down as much as possible. He didn’t want her to worry too much but being so much in love with her, he couldn’t exclude her from something that occupied his mind so much.
“Do you want me to help in any way?” she asked.
“Not unless you desperately want to get involved with things of the distant past, I mean my grandfather’s time during the War.”
“I know how important those things are for you, my darling. I don’t need to get involved. Only if you want me to. I trust you will do the right things. But if ever you or your mother should need my help, just let me know.”
“Oh yes, there’s something you could do. You could help Mum with her visitors next week. Some old friends of hers from her young days in Newcastle are comin
g down south to visit. They’re quite decent women, in fact very nice people, and I’m sure Mum would love you to take them round, show them a few things, you know.”
“I’d love to do that,” Rebecca smiled. “You know I like your mother very much, and I’m glad to give her a hand with things.”
“Well, I don’t think she needs a lot of help, but she could do with some support with the tourist thing.”
“Okay, I’ll arrange things with her.”
“You are such a darling.”
Andrew decided to involve Dave. The next day, he called him, and the two friends met at Dave’s apartment at the bottom end of Grange Road. After some small-talk and a few comments about the current political situation, they came to what Andrew had on his mind.
“So, what’s that problem for which you need my help?” Dave asked.
“Don’t laugh, but it’s got to do with the past, with the time of the last war, and my grandfather’s role in it.” Then Andrew told him what he knew about his grandfather, his mother’s investigations and finally about that Wolfgang fellow and the blackmail. Then he asked Dave for advice.
“I think it’s clear,” Dave answered. “Just ignore the idiot. Whatever he knows - if he even knows anything that’s shameful or whatever - it can’t be that bad. Besides, who cares? Nobody gives a hoot about petty little crimes committed some sixty years ago. Why dig up the past? So, your granddad may have stolen a gun from some Nazi bloke, or whatever. Let it be. Let sleeping dogs lie.”
This advice appeared very sensible to Andrew. Even if that fellow published what he knew - say, in a TV talk-show or in some tabloid paper - it would never have a big effect. Granddad was an old invalid. So, what would be the worst thing that could happen? Neither Mum nor Dad were important people, people of interest to the general public. Nobody would blame an ordinary person, a law-abiding decent citizen, for anything that one of their ancestors had done during war-times in the last century.
Andrew’s decision was taken. He told his mother. She was uncertain. “And you’d really take the risk. You’d let the man publish what he knows?” she wondered.
“Indeed, I would. Let him do what he likes. Let him do what he wants with his scanty knowledge of no importance. Let him put it in his pipe and smoke it!” Andrew smiled.
“Well, if you think so,” his mother answered, hesitatingly.
They changed the subject. The mother was full of excitement over the impending visit of her friends. This was going to be much more than a casual visit, it was the first - and perhaps the only - reunion of Nora’s school friends. While she had been staying in touch with Debbie in London and Janet in Bristol, she had not seen any of the others since her school days. Debbie, who was still the great communicator and who kept in touch with many other people from her Newcastle days, had now organized this reunion. She had been planning this for over two years, but it had taken so long to get everyone to agree on a common date.
“There will be Janet, of course, but there will also be Christine, Sophie and Amy,” she’d informed Nora in her latest email message. Whereas Janet had kept in touch with Nora and had been to see her in Eastbourne on several occasions, neither of the other three women had ever been to England’s south coast, so Debbie invited them all for an extended weekend in Eastbourne, hoping that Nora would be their local guide.
“Are you going to natter about the good old days in Newcastle when you get together?” Andrew asked.
“Those good old days weren’t all that good. We had our disagreements, our rivalries and a few big conflicts. But we never really broke up as a loose group of girls in a male-dominated and narrow-minded society. The biggest conflict we had was about Janet, when she got pregnant at fifteen.”
“Was that when Bob was born?” Andrew had met Bob when they visited Janet in Bristol the first time. Bob was twelve years his senior. Andrew had never really liked Bob because he considered him vulgar. Bob was a hands-on type who only considered manual labour real work, he called all university graduates pussy-footers, and he used four-letter-words in almost every sentence; that is if he ever produced a full sentence.
“Oh, don’t judge him,” Nora said. “He had such a hard time when he was young.”
“Why?”
“Well, Janet and her child were social outcasts. You know, in those days it was considered a great shame when a girl got pregnant as a teenager and without being married. It was always the girl’s fault, never the boy who got her pregnant, and she was made to feel it. I remember in Newcastle, people pointed their fingers at her and warned their daughters not to have anything to do with such a bad girl.”
Andrew changed the subject and promised his mother he would help her when it came to hosting her friends. He suggested he might show them round, showing them Beachy Head, Pevensey Castle and other sights in the area.
When her old friends arrived, Nora put them up at the Hydro Hotel. It was arranged that Andrew would join them for the evening meal on their first day.
He parked his old car in the hotel car-park and walked through the lobby to the dining area. He was just stepping through the open doors of the elegant partition between the hotel lobby and the dining area when he was stopped by a middle-aged man in a dark suit and a silver-grey necktie.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the man said and stopped Andrew with his right arm.
“I’m just going to join some friends–” Andrew began.
“You can’t come in like this, sir.”
“What’s wrong about me?”
“We are an elegant hotel, sir. I’m afraid you have to wear a jacket and a tie.”
“But it’s summer, and it’s warm, as you must feel yourself.”
“Again, I’m sorry, sir, but these are the rules.”
So Andrew could only wave to the table where his mother was sitting with her friends before he walked out of the hotel. He found the situation too ludicrous to make any more comments. But he couldn’t help mumbling “ridiculous” as he left the hotel through the front doors.
Back in his flat, Rebecca asked him if he didn’t want to let his mother know. So he sent her a short text message and explained the reason for his absence.
The next day, he went to his mother’s house and walked to the hotel with her. In the lobby, at last, he was personally introduced to everyone. As he already knew Debbie and even Janet, he was particularly interested in the other three women. They all greeted him with enthusiasm, and Christine even kissed him on his cheek. He’d never been kissed by a middle-aged woman he’d never met before. And as the conversation among all of them took off, he soon realized that Christine was the most charming woman of the group, obviously a woman of the world, in her early fifties, with well-groomed clothes and a stylish hair-do. When she spoke, she betrayed a higher level of education than the others. She liked to round off all her statements with comment like, “Don’t we all know?” or: “I know you all agree.”
Observing the group of middle-aged women, Andrew tried to imagine them as teenagers when they were all schoolmates in Newcastle. It was difficult to imagine them as young girls. This made quite an impression on him.
The weather being nice, with only a few white clouds in an otherwise deep-blue sky, they went off for a walk along the seafront. Andrew went along with them as far as the Pier, then he excused himself and went to work.
In the evening, sitting comfortably in his living-room with Rebecca, he told her of his impression.
“I was trying to see those women as young girls, as a group of naive schoolgirls, but I found it extremely difficult.”
“Why should they have been naive? They may very well have been quite sophisticated. But I can see your point. Life goes on and on, and it has its impact on us. We won’t be the same at their age, too, and it’s a good thing.”
“Of course, you’re right, my darling. But
it just made me realize how the ageing process works on us. My granddad used to like his Latin proverbs, and one of them was ‘Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis,’ which means ‘Times change and we change in, or with, them.’ So, if our bodies change so much within only twenty or thirty years, what about our minds? Are we still the same persons at fifty or sixty that we were at twenty?”
“You worry too much. Is it about your granddad? About his past, as you told me several times? I can understand that we will always be confronted with such questions whenever we see our grandparents, or even when we look at ourselves in the mirror. It’s a fact, we’re all growing old.”
“Yes, but for me it’s much more.”
Rebecca just looked at him with a tender expression. She loved him so much. While she could understand his interest in topics like this she nevertheless tried to cheer him up when he fell into one of his gloomy moods. He was such a positive person, but sometimes he lost himself in such deep questions. It was clearly connected with his keen interest in history, particularly with the history in which his grandfather played some dubious role.
The next day, Andrew took the day off and devoted his time to his mother and her friends. He went with them on all those local excursions that they had talked about before the arrival of the friends. When they stood on the lawn in the middle of the ruins of Pevensey Castle, having paid their admission fee to the woman from English Heritage, Andrew gave them a lively and very informative lecture on the Norman Conquest, showing them where the coastline had been in 1066, and giving them a very lively, almost theatrical account of the hardships the Anglo-Saxon soldiers had suffered on their quick-march from Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire all the way down to the south coast. His audience was attentive, and they could all see how the Anglo-Saxons under King Harold of Wessex didn’t stand a chance against the waiting army of the Normans under Duke William.
So they were well-prepared for the next stop on their exploration tour, the battle-field itself. Andrew made sure they could visualize the battle, the battle-cries, the bloody fights, the dying men, the King’s death, William’s oath and his founding of Battle Abbey.
White Lies Page 25
