Strange Music (2 page)

Isabella, who had the same aversion to
kids
as Eric, was annoyed at being unable to take a contrary viewpoint, so instead she observed, ‘That wasn't anything
like
a goat.'

‘I was imitating a rare breed of Swiss mountain goat,' he explained. ‘
Ibex helvetica
. Found only in Calabria.'

‘Calabria is not in Switzerland.'

‘Bloody biologists, eh!' he said.

‘Eric!' Marianne snapped.

‘Sorry. Someone – I feel sure – was about to make the point that having to discipline our two-year-olds makes even our four- and five-year-olds more responsible than is usual for
children
of that age. But it's amazing how they forget it all as soon as the younger ones go in for their nap.'

‘How would
you
know when they're taking a nap?' Isabella asked.

‘Because that's when Sam and Charley start running races along the tops of the walled-garden walls, which they never do if the younger ones are around.'

‘Can we forget the children for an hour or two?' Gracie asked wearily.

‘Don't you care if Charley falls and breaks his neck?' May asked (thinking only of Sam, of course).

‘Charley has fallen out of every tree for miles around. Listen, I don't like pulling rank here—'

‘But someone has to,' Eric assured her.

‘Quite! With the first child you worry if they stop breathing for more than five seconds. With the second you worry if the crying goes on for more than . . . two minutes. With the third one you only
start
to worry if you notice that bits of it are missing.'

Felix joined them, having followed the conversation through his open studio window. ‘If we're into grown-up talk, then,' he said, ‘I wanted to let people know that the Baker Street Classic is holding late-night showings of
Ehe im Schatten –
Marriage in the Shadows. It's
a really good post-war German film based on the life of the actor Joachim Gottschalk and his wife, Meta Wolff, who was Jewish.'

‘We saw it at the
BBC
staff film club,' Angela added. ‘If people want to go up to town, they'll miss the last train but they're welcome to stay at our place in Robert Street. And we can babysit for them here. Dilys Powell said it's the best flick on in London at the moment.'

There were no takers.

‘Willard?' Marianne said.

He pulled a face. ‘What is it about? Persecution . . . concentration camps . . . death?'

‘It's persecution,' Felix agreed, ‘but that's not what follows. I won't tell you how it ends.'

‘Not on a yellow-brick road,' Eric put in. ‘Please not that! Once is enough.'

Still Willard was reluctant. ‘It's not as if we don't
know
what happened back then. Some of us were in at the . . . I mean, we were there when it all got opened up.' He turned to Eric. ‘Some of us.'

‘Oh, I go there in my dreams,' Eric assured him. ‘And where are
you
then, Willard? Just when I need you?'

Willard tried not to laugh.

‘I think I would like to go,' Marianne said. ‘Nicole?'

‘Yes!' She looked defiantly at Tony and added, ‘I can also get that Sanderson's wallpaper at Heal's.'

Tony raised both hands in surrender and said, ‘Georgian stripes!'

Isabella told him that would be very fashionable, to which he answered, ‘Quite! It's also about ten times more expensive than Walpamur.'

Above their heads, unnoticed in her bedroom window, Betty Ferguson watched and listened through the half-open sash. She didn't always understand what they said but she had a better grasp of why they said it. Marianne was often alone because Willard was always practising. All architects spend their days
practising
architecture. But Willard was also practising to fly with his architecture – and to fly very high. He usually spent his days flying high over London but he never brought his aeroplane to Panshanger airfield, where lots of local flyers had aircraft. They would often fly over the Dower House, especially in summer, when they flew very low, because Marianne liked to sunbathe without clothes on, up there on their little balcony at the top of the bow windows on the south side of the house, above the memorial to ‘Winnie a Faithful Dog.' Swedish people like her lived where there was no sun for half the year so they needed to soak it in when they could – all over their bodies, so it wasn't sinful for them. But Willard got angry and took the Atco out onto the big lawn and cut a naughty message into the grass, starting with F and ending with OFF, but they paid no attention. So that must be why he never flew his aeroplane to Panshanger. And Mum said if that sort of behaviour continued, they'd leave the community and find somewhere to live in Dormer Green because the school was excellent. (If she meant it seriously, then someone ought to tell her that lots of children there used that word so there would be no point.) Anyway, Marianne wished Willard would spend more time practising at home and less flying high in London. Luckily she herself could still do lots of practising architecture here at the Dower House.

All the other children called their parents by their Christian names because it was no good standing howling in the yard and calling out ‘Mummy!' because all eight mummies would leave it to the other seven to go first. All the children at school thought it sounded very naughty and it made them giggle but it was amazing how normal it seemed inside the community. And after all Sally was Sally and Nicole was Nicole years before they became ‘Mummy.'

Nicole's baby, Andrew, was looked after by Lena-such-a-sad-case. Her son Tommy got left with her by a
GI
who was killed in France. He was born on 1 April 1944 and Lena said he was her April Fool's joke. Mummy wasn't really happy with that situation, either. Nor with Felix, who was married to Angela but also lived with Faith. Daddy said Faith was just a lodger and it was perfectly all right and anyway she lived in the annexe to Angela's cottage. Mummy said it stopped being the annexe the moment they knocked a doorway through the dividing wall.

Faith came out of her annexe at that moment and entered the backyard, stretching and rubbing her eyes with the knuckles of her left hand. ‘Finished,' she said, handing a proof copy of a book to Angela. ‘God, but it's bleak.' She turned to Nicole. ‘You're going to hate it. I don't see how anyone can have a shred of belief left in communism after this.'

Communism was what Daddy had believed in once – all about having libraries and parks and schools and doctors for everyone, without needing to pay.

‘When's it out?' Willard asked. ‘Put me down for half a dozen, if it's that good.'

‘Next month. We're not doing it. We don't handle fiction. I got it from a friend at Secker. Orwell had better watch his back. That's all I can say.'

Betty, who heard ‘wash his back,' realized this was one of those moments when the grown-up world dissolved into utter incomprehensibility. And it was quite late. And she had sixty hooks and tails to do for her writing homework . . . and . . .
yawn
. . . She left the outside world to its own enigmas.

‘Willard!' Adam walked out from his and Sally's wing of the house. ‘Is it true?'

‘Is what true?'

‘You got part of the Festival carve-up?'

Willard levelled a finger at him. ‘Stop right there! If you value your life, stop right there.'

Tony laughed. ‘So it is true!'

‘You'd have done the same. Don't say you wouldn't.'

‘What . . . what?' came from several directions.

Reluctantly Willard obliged, after saying, ‘I'll get you for this. OK, what happened was I put in for some design work on this Festival of Britain extravaganza that—'

‘Your Tory friends won't like that!' Nicole taunted.

‘They'll understand when they hear the full of it. I didn't expect to make it at all – now it can be revealed. So I was very happy to meet with the Disbursements Panel yesterday, even though I was last on the list. So I go in, and they're all grinning their heads off – which should have alerted me, I allow – and they say, “Sorry, old bean, but there's only the public lavatories left.” So I turn on my heel – without a word – and head for the door. And I've just got my hand on the door handle when Basil Spence calls out, “It's worth nearly a quarter of a million, Willard!” And this is me.' He already had his hand on the imaginary door handle so he dropped it as if poleaxed. Ditto his jaw. He spun about and sought wildly for something to steady himself upon, saying, ‘Did someone say a quarter-million or was that my greed and wounded pride talking? And then Gerald Barry chuckled, like he does, and said, “Pull up a pew and let's go through it.” And here I am.' He bowed with a Georgian flourish. ‘Purveyor of one-, two-, and three-holers – what am I saying? Purveyor of ten-, twenty-, and
thirty
-holers to the Festival of Britain – if it ever comes to pass, that is.'

Everybody laughed – except Marianne. Felix was watching her and saw that this news was news to her, too. She caught his eye and grimaced.

After that, people broke into smaller groups, some remaining beneath the ash, others wandering among the beds of newly planted shrubs and perennials.

Angela put her proof copy onto the umbrella stand just inside the cottage door and walked off arm-in-arm with Nicole. ‘Good news today,' she said. ‘One more has gone – Erich Neumann, you remember? Goering's little darling who wanted his skilled Jews to be spared until they'd finished work on the V-rockets? He's been held by the British since 'forty-five but they let him go last month because of ill-health and I've just heard he's died.'

‘So that's Heydrich, Kritzinger, Freisler, Luther, Meyer, Bühler, Schöngarth, Lange – and now Neumann!' Nicole did a little victory dance on the spot. ‘Nine.'

‘Nine down. Six to go.'

Marianne, seeing them wander off up the short drive, was about to join them when Felix took her arm. ‘She's breaking the good news that Neumann has died.'

‘When?'

‘I don't know. Very recently.'

‘So they're still keeping count.'

‘Angela has the benefit of friends in the World Service and the monitoring units.'

‘The full horror of the
Vernichtung
,' Marianne said, ‘has hardly even begun to penetrate in Britain. Yet.'

‘Well, the country's been very good to us.'

‘I know. I know. I'm not really grumbling.'

‘Not about the
British,
anyway!'

‘Right!' She leaned her head briefly on his shoulder. ‘Why is he so secretive? I
knew
he was in for a piece of the Festival cake. He told me. Does he think I'm not all that concerned? It baffles me, honestly.' After a pause, she added, ‘And you can bet your bottom dollar
I'm
going to be doing half the bloody drawings. He's not going to let this little bit of socialist megalomania – as he sees it – stand in the way of the latest Willard Johnson multi-storey! Oh, let's talk about something else. Dying Nazis and Willard's wheels-within-wheels are enough for one fucking day.'

Felix turned sharply round to glance behind them.

‘What?' she asked.

‘Gracie Ferguson. It's all right. She can't have heard. She thinks our language and our morals are not quite
comme-il-faut
.'

‘And who's
she
? Her father had a market stall somewhere down in Whitechapel. I ask you!'

Felix laughed. ‘You're getting more English than the English.'

‘If she doesn't like our ways, she can go. I don't see why
we
should change . . . and look over our shoulders all the time. Anyway, she'd wreck young Betty's life if they upped sticks and went – she's the tribal matriarch.'

‘W-e-l-l—'

‘Well what?'

‘Someone said – back there round the tree – they couldn't afford to leave, and—'

‘May. She said that.'

‘That's right. Anyway, I was watching Gracie and she had a very superior smile – a smirk, in fact – on her face, so I'm sure—'

‘How could you see that from such a distance?'

‘With binoculars. I stand back in the room and watch through binoculars. Often. You see people's faces large but with the simplification of distance. I do lots of drawings that way . . .' Her horrified stare halted him. ‘So if you were plotting a murder,' he concluded, ‘do it round the south side of the house.'

She laughed awkwardly. ‘It's not
that
bad between Willard and me.'

And that perturbed him, for he had meant it as a fantasy with no actual reference to the real Marianne and the real Willard.

Wednesday, 8 June 1949

As yet only four children attended the local school in Dormer Green – Betty, Charley, Sam, and Tommy, son of Lena-such-a-sad-case. Their way led down through the coppice and up across the fields, emerging onto the road at the edge of the village – the only bit of highway straight enough for their parents to feel comfortable about letting them walk on tarmacadam. The rest of it, having been designed when ‘the rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road,' was far too dangerous for pedestrians, even though only one or two vehicles would use it during the average daytime hour. Sooner or later a child would be turning the wrong corner at the
wrong
hour. So, rain or shine, they put on their wellies and oilskins or carried them in bags, and set off before eight thirty for a long mile across the fields.

Usually their mothers, Lena, Gracie Ferguson and May Prentice, took it in turn to accompany them there in the morning and bring them home each weekday afternoon; occasionally one of the other elders – needing something from the shops, taking something to the post, or simply in want of an hour in the fresh air – would give them a break. On this particular morning Gracie had already set off and was just past the deserted pigsties when Eric caught up with her and offered to take over. ‘Absolute disaster at Brandon Towers,' he explained breathlessly. ‘We ran out of fags.'