“Heartrending but irresistible.” Rosaleen Whateley, Liverpool Daily Post
“Extremely fast paced and expertly told … her characters are alive and disturbingly real.” San Francisco Chronicle
“She writes with a sharpness of outline which would not shame Simenon.” J.W. Lambert, Sunday Times
FM6
A House on the Rhine – I
THEY were peeling potatoes under the acacia tree. There was such a huge mound that it would take Katie and Moe at least two hours to finish them all; and when they were done there would still be the onions to do. Katie always tried to leave the onions to Moe. Her own hard almond-shaped eyes were delicate, the onions made her cry. Katie’s child Peppi was crawling under the old garden table in the dust of the yard. He wore a single cotton garment and was, as usual, filthy. He was one of those babies who always seem miserable, as if he sensed his unwanted-ness.
Moe was smoking. Her thick tawny hair needed washing. It hung in her black eyes as she unhurriedly peeled, dipping the potatoes into a pail of dirty water and then throwing the skins anywhere on the ground. Katie eyed the litter.
“Pa’ll be mad if he finds those peelings on the ground when he comes back, Moe,” she observed disinterestedly.
“Let him be mad, then,” yawned her mother, cigarette in her mouth as she worked.
“Oh well, Krista or Anna’ll clear it up—they’re as bad as Pa for that sort of thing,” said Katie.
“Krista’s getting real pretty—she’ll be a beauty when she’s filled out a bit more—she’s so childish still.”
“It’s time she did fill out—she’s almost eighteen!” There was something vicious in the way Katie said this.
Moe looked at her sardonically. “The late-ripened apples are the sweetest,” she said. “You were an early one.”
“Krista’s just plain dumb,” snapped Katie, throwing a long piece of peel angrily over her shoulder. “For eighteen she gives me a pain in the neck.”
“We don’t know how old she really is—that’s the fact of it. Sometimes she looks about twelve, and when she’s serious and quiet she could be eighteen and more, couldn’t she?”
Katie wasn’t listening. Her child, Peppi, had seized one of Pa’s young chickens in his fat hands and was trying to throttle it. The hens ran about all over the dirty untidy yard looking for food. Moe had cut a hole in the fence so that they could try their luck in the garden next door, but that hadn’t been a success because the British family next door had a cat. The cat had eaten several chickens and Pa had been furious. He would be very angry if this small bird was throttled, and Moe, suddenly launching herself upon Peppi, tried to rescue it. The child would not release his hold on the bird until she smacked him, and his roars rang through the garden.
“You hit him too hard,” screamed Katie; “he’s only two.” Her heavy face was red with anger as she looked sullenly at her mother. Moe calmly lit a fresh cigarette and continued her potato-peeling.
“You’ll have to pay for that wretched bird—he sets such store by them—it’s dead.”
“And where d’you think I’m to find the money? You know what I earn—nothing.”
“You’re getting it from somewhere. D’you think I haven’t noticed all your new bits of finery?”
Katie paled and instinctively put her hands up to her ears from which dangled the new gold hoops she had recently bought. The screams of the child had changed from fear to anger, anger at the woman who had hit him. He stopped bawling suddenly, as children do, and picking up a stick struck out at Moe’s bare legs.
“Bad Moe, bad bad Moe,” he shouted.
Moe laughed, pushing him away as unconcernedly as one brushes off a fly. He lost his balance and went rolling in the dust. Katie got up and spat at her mother.
“That’ll do, leave him alone, you’ll have all the neighbours out here. Look, the windows are opening already.”
While Moe stared up at the many windows in the upper stories of the once lovely house, Katie leaned over and took a cigarette from her mother’s packet.
“Take the child in—and leave my cigarettes alone. If you can buy gold ear-rings you can buy your own cigarettes!”
Katie picked up the screaming Peppi and took him into the house.
“And come back quickly and finish these spuds, you lazy slut!” her mother shouted after her as, putting down her knife she leaned back, stretching like a cat on her hard wooden chair.
It was already hot. The sun made a golden dusty curtain where Peppi had stirred the sandy earth of the yard. Moe stretched out her legs and flung her shapely arms above her head, yawning as she relaxed from her work. The sun’s voluptuous warmth penetrated her thin dress and her face took on a dreamy softer look. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back on the chair. It was very pleasant in the garden. She felt glad to be alive. She did not notice the litter and the untidiness around her, or the inquisitive heads peering out from behind the curtains upstairs. And so she sat, relaxed and still, until Katie came back from having put Peppi to sleep. She was not surprised to be told quite mildly to finish the potatoes. Moe was like that. Furious and raging one minute, warm and comforting the next. She even gave Katie a cigarette before she went herself from the brilliant sunlight into the dark house.
In the large room, once an elegant salon, where Moe now slept with her husband Joseph, she flung back the wooden shutters and stood for a time looking at herself in the spotted stained mirror. What did he see in her? With all these young fresh faces, why choose hers? What did he find in her? She didn’t know. She could see no good reason for his choice.
In the looking-glass her rather coarse vital face with the turbulent vibrant hair stared back at her. She was fascinated by it. Not because it was her face but because he liked it. She dabbed some powder on it carelessly, and passed a lipstick over her large generous mouth. Her dress was damp with sweat. She flung it off and went naked into the hall lobby where she splashed cold water over herself. She was drawing a cotton wrapper round her fine strong body when she turned to find Katie eyeing her critically.
“You’re going in to him now?” asked the girl curiously.
“I am. You go and get on with the meal—and don’t you forget what I said about the boys. Keep them away from here. I do draw the line at them knowing I’m in here.”
As she spoke she opened the door of a small darkened room next to hers and Joseph’s. The sleeping form of a young man was visible on the bed; but before the door closed again Katie had heard the sleepy but ardent greeting of Rudi the lodger, and had seen his arms stretch upwards for her mother.
With a shrug of her young shoulders Katie returned to the zinc tub in the garden and toiled away for an hour or so; then she went indoors again and came out with a portable radio set. Presently the lilting strains of a sentimental tango filled the air. Putting down her knife the girl hitched up her skirt, gave her full hips a twitch, and with a curious defiant grace began to dance in rhythm to the music.
She danced unconscious of anything ridiculous or unusual in her surroundings, of the dirt and dust of the yard. The hens scuttled away in terror as her dance became wilder and wilder. Upstairs, faces peeped again out of the windows at the girl who danced so shamelessly at noon in full view of the road. They were hostile faces and condemnatory eyes. For although they belonged to refugees from the East, unpopular enough in the village, this family who lived on the ground and first floor of the great house were hated even more. They were known as the “bunker” family because of their having spent four and a half years in a “bunker,” or air-raid shelter, under the cathedral in Cologne. The miserable yellow dog watched the dancer mournfully from his chain in a corner of the yard. Behind her three rows of washing swung lightly in the breeze.
Across the road in the little white house almost hidden by weeping willows the Frenchman had come home for his noonday meal. His car door slammed, and as he turned to shut the gate he caught sight of the girl dancing. He stood there for several
minutes watching her, his cigar in his mouth. The bright merciless midday sun showed up the state of dilapidation to which the once-imposing house had come. The rubbish and filth of the once lovely garden, the broken toys littered about, the bicycles pushed against the toppling fence, the broken hen-house, the neglected flower-beds trampled down by the heavy boots of the boys—all were highlighted. The house itself with paint peeling off, tiles missing from the roof, and its pretentious pillars pitted with the marks of gunfire as was its face, looked forlorn and neglected. Against it the figure of the girl was vibrantly alive as she turned, swayed and dipped, oblivious of everything. Nothing could detract from the beauty of the acacia tree whose proud flowering dominated the scene and apologized for everything else. Its exotic scent filled the entire garden, and the little summer house, once the pride and delight of the owner of the house, was almost hidden in the exuberant wealth of its foliage.
The Frenchman noticed all this as he stood there smoking. Nothing escaped him. His sad, rather cynical eyes took it all in before he turned on his heel and went in to his disagreeable old French housekeeper. She never ceased to grumble, to pine for her native country, to curse the Germans around them. Today her master was tired of her. The Comité des Forges was giving trouble. There was all this Ruhr-Saar business working up. There were days when he hated coal with a deadly loathing. Today was one of the days. He cut her grumblings short and told her to go back to France. Her ceaseless complaints about the dampness of the village on the Rhine which gave her rheumatism made him realize the futility and uselessness of life. He hated that. He wanted to see youth, hear youth, and be with youth for a while. Like that red-haired girl over there in that filthy garden. She was young, alive, full of life—just as the exuberant laughter of the mother excited him, so the daughter’s dancing for the sheer love of it satisfied something in him. Let the old hag go back to France and do her grumbling there.
“Bring the food!” he shouted. He would enjoy this meal knowing it was the last time he would hear her creaking boots and be irritated by the innumerable wrinkles in her black woollen stockings.
So engrossed was Katie in her dance that she failed to mark the arrival of her brothers. They came tearing in from school and work like a pack of ravenous dogs, shouting, quarrelling and swearing. They stopped short at the sight of their sister dancing and taunted her unmercifully.
“You’ve got Hank’s new radio set!” screamed Karl. “Just wait until I tell him tonight. Look at Katie’s red face, Hans, it’s the same colour as her hair. Ha. Ha!”
“She’s practising for next year’s Carnival!” jeered Heinz. “Our lovely little sister—I don’t think!”
Katie turned on them furiously with a large wooden spoon which she had seized from the table, returning their jibes with furious blows and imprecations. They dodged the spoon, teasing unmercifully; then, at her threat of no food, they reluctantly desisted and retired to the summer house. Shaking with anger and mortification she switched off the radio and sullenly set about preparing their midday meal.
Slowly the windows upstairs closed one by one. They had all been flung open when the battle began in the garden. Katie hated the days when the twins, Hans and Heinz, came home for the midday meal. The other three boys, Robert, Karl and Franz Joseph as well as her own small Peppi she could manage, but when the twins, great lumping mischievous lads of sixteen, came home too, the place was bedlam. There was trouble every day now. Katie could not control the twins as Moe could, and Moe no longer cared. Since the lodger had come she had left everything to Katie. If Hank had been at home he would have wielded his authority. Without exception the boys feared him.
All the time that his father had been away at the war Hank, young as he was, had ruled his brothers and sisters without mercy. He worked now at the ship-repairing station in the great bend of the Rhine which formed a natural basin for the work. It was too far for him to get home at midday. Katie missed his help. He was terrifically strong, and he was cruel. She kept insisting that the twins take their food to the factory with them, as Hank did, but Moe was too indifferent to back her up, and Pa—he also seemed indifferent lately.
Katie glanced at her son Peppi asleep on the old settee in the big kitchen which served as their living-room. His dirty tear-stained face had the cherubic charm of an angel, and in his sleep his filthy little hands were turned palm upwards as if in supplication. In repose his face was amazingly like that of the young Belgian who was his father. She could see Henri’s face as he lay asleep under the willows by the river. She could see the same gold tips to the dark lashes on Peppi’s cheeks, the same smooth brow in sleep. Peppi would be dark later, as Henri had been.
Three years ago, that was. Katie had been only fourteen, and Peppi had been born before she was fifteen, long after Henri had returned to his own country. She looked at Henri’s child without any particular affection. Peppi was a burden. Until he was three he could not be placed in any nursery school. Since Rudi, the lodger, had come to the house, Moe had flatly declined to look after him as she had done for the first eighteen months of Peppi’s life. Katie had been able to go out to work then. She had earned good money in the big laundry near the station. Moe might say that Katie was lazy, but give her work that she liked and she was second to none. They had been pleased with her there. Now she was obliged to stay at home, and to earn her keep by doing all the housework and most of the cooking. She hated it.
All the others, Anna, Krista, Hank and the twins, could buy themselves new clothes, shoes, bicycles and radios—in fact every-thing they wanted. They earned well in the factories. Everyone could do overtime if he chose. But because of this brat Peppi, she had to slave all day at the endless washing and cooking. Whenever she thought of Henri now she just spat. Ach! she loathed the thought of him. He had got what he wanted and all she had got was Peppi. Henri had gone back to Belgium without thinking of her or of the results of his love-making under the willows. What was the use of Moe saying that as she, Katie, had paraded the village in one of her frocks and a pair of her high-heeled shoes, the young Belgian sentries could not have known her age? The one who had seduced her had thought she was at least eighteen or more. Ach! how she hated the thought of Henri now. It made her sick. She loved Leo, the great blonde lad who worked at the repair station with Hank. Now, there was a man! He was worth a thousand Henris. But Henri had been able to give her food three years ago, and she had been very hungry then. Now there was plenty for everyone, and hunger nearly a thing of the past—a mere memory. But Henri lived on; he was here permanently in Peppi his son.
Leo had a motor cycle. They were all the rage now. Hank wanted one. He would get it too. It gave a youth class to own one of the new gleaming machines. Everyone knew what they cost; but Leo and his friends had ways of making easy money. After Leo found that he could trust her, he had tried her out. She had been slipping out to help him for some time now, and he had shown her how she also could get a rake-off from their profits for herself. She was able to have some of the money denied her from laundry work by Moe. She had been slipping out at night now for over three months, and no one knew except Hank. You couldn’t keep anything from Hank. He twisted your arms, flattened your nose, or dug his strong cruel fingers into the nape of your neck until you screamed for mercy.
Hank had met her creeping back to the house at dawn one morning when he himself was returning from setting rabbit-snares by the river. When he had heard about Leo’s gang—and he had forced it out of her by giving her “the works” as he called his tortures—he had insisted on being let into the whole thing himself. Katie had been terrified of Leo’s displeasure, but to her surprise Leo had been rather pleased. He could use another tough one, he had said. Hank was tough. He had proved that all right. Hadn’t he been the head of the gang that had waylaid cyclists on the Grune Ring at dusk and coshed them while the others stole their purses, wallets or even bicycles? Wasn’t it Hank who had been the leader of the gang of boys who had gone round putting insulting letters i
n the doors of the Occupation? Hadn’t he led the gang who had painted notices telling the Occupation to go home? Leo had been delighted at this new acquisition. On his advice Hank had disbanded his own gang. Things had got too sticky. Besides, the Occupation were on their way out now—or at least it looked like it. Hank had so far proved a success, and Leo was pleased with Katie. Tonight she and Hank would slip out as usual and join the others as the usual meeting-place.
At the thought of the coming evening her spirits rose again, and she began singing. After the raid planned for tonight was safely over she would have Leo to herself. She loved Leo. She loved him passionately and jealously. He was king of the gang and could pick and choose. All the girls wanted him. She had seen his eyes on the others, Maria, Leila and Trudi. She was not blind, and she knew that his feeling for her was transient and as nothing to the violent passion she had for him. He was cruel, too, and quite ruthless in attaining his own ends. But tonight would be hers. He had said so. She would have to arrange about Peppi. Krista would take the child to bed with her. Krista was soft and dumb. At the thought of Krista’s love for children Katie’s lip curled.
The boys’ meal was ready. She shouted to them to come and get it. Her red hair gleamed in the sun as she stood there waiting for her brothers to emerge from the summer house. Shrieks and giggles came from them but they did not come out. Her thoughts were still on the coming evening. She would wear the new frock Leo had bought her. She hated her red hair. While Moe’s was a lovely tawny treacle colour and Anna and Carola were blonde with black eyes, her hair was a brilliant red. In this village they thought it shameful to have such hair. People with hair that colour were not to be trusted, they said. Katie had endured taunts and jibes all her life about it. The Belgian, Henri, had loved it, had run his hands through it and said it was beautiful; and it seemed that in America and England there were film actresses with hair of this hateful shade. Katie loathed it. She wanted it black. The first thing she intended to do when she had enough money was to have it dyed.
The Dancing Bear Page 24
