Strange Music (19 page)

Chris and Anna, bleary eyed and hand-in-hand, walked up the brick path beside the yew hedge. ‘Looks grand,' he said. ‘You've done a really good job.'

Terence rose and tugged a forelock. ‘Us loikes to keep th'ole place lookin all shipshape 'n Bristow fashun fer the young master, Master,' he said.

‘Call me next time,' Chris responded with a grin as he and Anna strolled on by. ‘You've hardly made a dent in that hedge yet.'

‘Are we going to have a bonfire before Mummy and Daddy come to collect us?' Betty asked.

‘Are we going to burn it all?' Hilary asked Eric, who made a dubious face. ‘I suppose bonfire night is a bit too far away?'

‘We could prune back the other two sides for that,' Terence said.

‘And Faith and Sally are worried about their horses eating it,' May put in.

‘I've seen them eating the yew hedge itself,' Isabella said.

‘Apparently, eating the live yew isn't all that dangerous,' May said. ‘But even after just twenty minutes of being cut, it's lethal. I think you should burn it.'

‘Raah!' The Tribe cried; several of them rose and started a Redskin war dance, as demonstrated on all the best cinema screens every Saturday morning.

Nicole turned to Terence. ‘You and Hilary shouldn't need to come up here and work in this garden. You've got enough to look after by yourselves down there at the gate.'

Hilary bridled at that. ‘We are part of this community – even if we don't take part in your quaint attachment to shared electricity meters.'

Eric stepped in. ‘I'm sure Nicole was thinking of the effort you two put into this place compared with . . . er . . . certain nameless others.'

‘Shall I go and get some matches?' Sam asked.

Charley added, ‘And there's a bottle of paraffin in the smaller garages.'

‘Which will stay there!' Eric said firmly. ‘We shall light the fire in the traditional way by rubbing two boy scouts together. Cub scouts will do just as well.'

Terence stuffed the tail end of a flapjack into his mouth and, rising, said indistinctly, ‘We'd better start now or it'll still be burning after midnight.'

Nicole went off with Betty and Sam to get potatoes, for baking in the ashes once the fire started to die down. May took Hannah and Frederick, her youngest, to bring round the garden hose and attach it to the tap by the ballroom steps.

There was hardly any wind and what there was came from the west, so the first people to get the smoke would be almost a mile away. Eric gathered The Tribe around. ‘Now this stuff would probably burn if we just struck a match and chucked it in anywhere. But here's how you can make a fire with even wet wood.'

He began with a cluster of dried grass, then minute twigs, bigger twigs, even bigger twigs . . . snaps of branches – always bridging any gaps with bunches of yew leaves, which crackled and spat like miniature volcanic fumaroles. Sam and Charley inhaled the smoke until they coughed and reeled like drunkards; seeing them the younger ones had to be restrained . . . until, at length, the heat of the fire drove the smoke up, up, way over their heads.

‘I think we can all be quite proud of Fire,' Eric said. ‘It's one of our great inventions. But now we must all dance around it just to make sure it knows we are its masters and, of all the animals that ever lived, we alone are not afraid of it. Or not enough, anyway.'

The Tribe started the dance they had rehearsed earlier, but soon everyone joined in – including Marianne and Willard, who laid down their glazing brads and putty knives in Rosy Primrose and ran to join them.

After twenty minutes or so, the fire settled into a comfortable middle age and became approachable enough to rake out some embers to cover the potatoes. ‘If you children all go off and have your baths now,' Nicole said, ‘and come back in your pyjamas, those spuds will be just about roasted by then. Quick-quick!'

The women went off with them and the three men sat on the ground and gazed into the red heart of the fire. Moments later Marianne shouted, ‘Hi!' from their balcony, overlooking the big lawn, and lowered a basket full of Tuborg straight from the fridge – church key and all.

‘You have her well trained,' Terence remarked, popping the cap on his bottle.

‘Well trained?' Eric asked, taking a swig and belching back the foam. ‘Well trained? Have you ever been to Sweden?'

He shook his head.

‘Well, you should. Everything we think we have to fight for, or invent for ourselves, they've already got. It's this guy here who needs the training.' He jerked a thumb at Willard.

Willard paid no heed. He emptied the bottle in four jerky gulps and, wiping his lips on his bare forearm, let out one long sigh. ‘Dreamed 'bout that aaaall day.' He reached for another. ‘Drink up – we got half the fridge full up there.'

There was a ruminative, staring-into-the-fire sort of silence before he spoke again. ‘Felix is being very non-committal about his trip to Israel. Were you with him all the time?'

‘Mostly,' Terence said. ‘Every evening, anyway, though we went our different ways on most days. It was interesting watching him change.'

‘From pro all things Zionist to anti?' Eric asked.

‘He certainly started very pro, but I wouldn't say he ended up anti. More like thoughtful . . . watchful. The Zionist Jews are very scornful and unfriendly to the German Jews. They keep saying “You brought it on yourselves. You should have come to Israel before the war.” But what none of them realizes is that they're all victims of American policy – keeping the quota, even after the war. Hundreds of thousands of Jews escaped extermination but America still refused them entry – and even America's Jews agreed. “Send them to Israel!” That was the answer. The Zionists were happy enough, of course. Their aim was, is, and always will be to colonize the whole of Palestine.'

Willard said, ‘You don't think the Arab countries all around have enough room to take in all the Palestinians – their own people, after all?'

‘Of course they do, in the same way that the English-speaking world would have enough room for all the Americans if some Martians invaded and kicked them out. We're from the same stock, after all. Sorry, we've strayed a bit far from Felix. I must say, he was a bit shaken when he saw an Israeli passport – “valid in all countries except Germany” stamped on the cover!'

‘I take your point,' Willard said, ‘about displacing whole people. But is there nothing good in the current set up? You were pretty anti before you went. Nothing changed your mind?'

Terence shook his head. ‘I suppose I moved slightly more toward the thoughtful-watchful part of the spectrum, too. I mean, the Israelis are doing amazing things. Grant them that. The Arabs have been there centuries and did little more than grow olives and herd goats – and in the south they were . . . just Bedouin. But the Israelis move in and the desert blooms. Lush vegetables . . . citrus orchards . . . it's like a biblical miracle. But those four words – the Israelis move in – are still . . . wrong. Just wrong. It's true that tens of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews were killed – and by the Arabs – but it still doesn't make it right to tell
another
Arab whose family lived there for generations, “You have till sunset – then we start with the bulldozers.” We saw dozens of Arabs in Jerusalem – everywhere – with keys hanging from chains round their necks. Not dozens. Hundreds. Everywhere. And then a friend told us those were keys to houses they were kicked out of by Israeli settlers. There are thousands of them now employed as labourers on land they once owned. It's so short-sighted. Those Arabs are never going to just throw away those keys. They'll be handed down as heirlooms, together with the imperative that goes along with them.'

‘Is that what changed Felix's mind?' Eric asked.

‘Well, he had to agree it was wrong but he also said we had to understand what forces were driving them. The
Vernichtung,
as he calls it, made them realize that unless they have a
Heimat
– a homeland – what the French call a
patrie,
they will be forever vulnerable to that sort of treatment, and they'll have nowhere to go. Which is true, but it doesn't alter the fundamentals. You can't steal your
Heimat
from others and call it your own. But you could agree a price and buy it.'

‘Historical precedent favours the first course,' Eric pointed out.

‘At what price?'

‘Oh, war, of course. In human history peace is never more than an interlude, when we catch our breath and smell the flowers.'

‘We'd better stir those potatoes a bit,' Willard said, taking the unburned end of a branch and raking among the ashes. ‘So Felix is left in a kind of limbo?' he added.

‘Oh, no – I think he's backed right off the idea of converting. That happened when he went to a synagogue, almost at the end of our visit. I wish I'd gone too, just to see it. The rabbi was an American, a new immigrant. A real zealot. He preached every quotation from the Bible where Jahweh promises this land to the Israelites, and he finished with Joshua at Jericho – how the Israelites were commanded by Jahweh to kill everything that moved after the walls fell, except the spies who had betrayed the city to Joshua. So the Israelites killed not just the men but also the women, the children, the oxen, the sheep, the asses . . . everything. And they took the gold and silver, of course. And this man preached this disgusting story as some kind of allegory of what God now wants the modern Israelites – the Israelis – to do with the latter-day unbelievers – the Palestinian Arabs. I really felt so sorry for Felix. He can't possibly have come across that sort of triumphalist Zionism in Mauthausen.' He leaned forward and gingerly tested the firmness of one of the baked potatoes.

‘Fundamentally,' Terence said, ‘Felix is a loner, not a joiner. He never joined the resistance when he was on the run. He mentioned that a couple of times. Still, he's come back with a nice, juicy commission from Ben Gurion.'

Eric added, ‘
And
an invitation for Fogel to go out there and talk over some publishing collaborations. That will please Doubleday. And so the world goes on turning, no matter what Joshua may have thought in the Valley of Ajalon. Time passes so slowly when you're on a killing spree for your beliefs. Of course Felix would know all about
that
.
'

‘Eric?' Willard said. ‘Can it, huh?'

‘
Pas devant les enfants?
Speak of the devils – here they come. Time for us all to catch our breath and smell the flowers.'

Saturday, 19 August 1950

‘But if the Tithe Barn had been part of the
original
renting,' Angela pointed out, ‘and Tony says it jolly nearly was – but if it had been part of the
original
lease to the community—'

‘. . . I'd have taken it like a shot, rather than this cottage,' Felix said. ‘I know. And I'm not arguing that I wouldn't have.'

‘So!'

‘So, nothing. It
wasn't
part of the original community. Now it's just an afterthought. A postscript. Something we're thinking of tacking on. And I just can't
feel
. . .'

‘Come on,
Liebling
! This community is little more than four years old. It's already lost and gained people. Nothing's really fixed here. If we move to the Tithe Barn now, d'you think that when it's four
teen
years old anyone will remember that it
wasn't
part of the original—'

‘But we will
own
that land – three quarters of an acre. Nobody else here will own anything. We won't be part of the
community
.'

Angela tore at her hair in mime. ‘You really think that scrap of paper you signed, making us subtenants of Tony and Adam . . . you think
that's
what makes us “part of this community?”'

‘Besides, it's so far away.'

‘It's a hundred and fifteen paces.
My
paces, which makes it about a hundred yards.' A thought struck her. ‘I know what it is – the entrance door faces
away from
the Dower House. You feel it's like turning our backs on the community. What if . . . now I don't know if we'd get consent to this, but what if we could swap the two windows on the south side, facing into the Dower House grounds . . . what if we could swap them over with the barn door? Then we could lay a short bit of a gravel drive straight off the existing one. Fifty yards.' He drew breath to speak but she got in first with: ‘Or are you just going to say no to everything?'

He let the breath out again and gave it some thought. ‘I'd lose the north light.'

‘No. You'd still have the two windows. And anyway, you've got no north light at all, here. And as for ownership versus renting . . . don't you think the gravel company will have to give up in the end? They're bound to realize they're
never
going to get consent to demolish the Dower House. Nor will they be able to mine gravel around the park. The law has now made agricultural tenancies as good as title deeds. When they realize that, they'll sell. And the community, as sitting tenants, will be sitting on a bargain. A gold mine. And then we – you and I – will just be the first owners in a community of owners. We'll be the pathfinders!'

Felix eyed her suspiciously. ‘Who put such ideas into your head?'

‘You should have a little talk with Sally. She has great ideas about—'

‘She has great
ambitions
. There's a difference. She wants to enter the halls of architectural fame on the wings of this conversion . . .'

‘She also has great ideas about the long-term future of the Dower House. Buying out the lease from the gravel company is only the start of it. Your tea's gone cold.'

She reached for the cup but he pulled it to him. ‘It's all right. It's a hot day. I like it like this.'