Summer at Gaglow (26 page)

Eva watched him as he described the city, the shortage of food, the absence of all meat and how if the war lasted even for another month there was unlikely to be any livestock left in the entire country, ‘But I shall say no more.’ Lowering his voice he told them that now, after four years of war, Hindenburg had ordered only hopeful conversations to be held.

Marianna wouldn’t let her daughters leave the apartment. She had been to Wertheim’s to look at comforters, with no real hope of buying, and found the shop half empty. ‘Laid up with the
grippe
,’ a sales assistant told her, promoted in this crisis to the job of manageress. She leant across the counter and whispered, ‘In the last week we’ve lost nearly seventy of our girls.’ Marianna put a hand up to her forehead. It was cool and even. ‘They say it’s much, much worse in the countryside,’ the manageress continued, crossing her arms against her chest. ‘In some villages whole families are dying out within a day. Women,’ she said, ‘who’ve waited patiently for four years for their men are burning up with fever, carted off in furniture vans before their young men even have a chance to ask for leave.’

Marianna shrank away from her, and the woman smiled and shivered and turned to help a customer, using gloved fingers to ensure that his pass allowed him to buy his wife a vest.

*

On her way home Marianna met the wife of old Herr Baum. She darted across the road and whispered that she was going to the bank to hand over her jewels, ‘Pearls given to me by my dear husband on our wedding day.’ Slipping one arm out of her muff Marianna glimpsed a string of pink, like tiny sausages, wound around her hand. ‘If you need a place to hide when the revolution comes,’ Frau Baum put away her pearls, ‘living right there by the royal palace, come straight round to us.’ And as they parted Marianna thought she caught her staring sharply at her hair. ‘
Guten Tag
, Frau Baum,’ Marianna waved and watched as the other woman hurried up the steps, pushing open the heavy doors into the bank.

Eva wrote a letter to Emanuel. She used only one side of the paper so that if he needed to he could use up the rest.

Dear Manu,

I won’t say anything at all about the gloomy state of things here in Berlin because it has been ruled that anyone with a bad word to say could end up with five years in prison. Bina has gone back to the hospital and when I visited her there I saw soldiers with arms and legs as thin as sticks. One man told me how he advanced from trench to trench for five days with nothing to eat at all and his friends who weren’t killed just fell down with exhaustion. This man survived by jumping down into an enemy trench, where he found biscuits and a cigarette!

Eva read through this letter and decided she should start again.

Dear Manu,

I think we should paint the walls of our house green so that we can imagine at all times we are in the garden. The ceilings could be blue, and wouldn’t it be nice to have a room without dark curtains? I shall throw out any cerise rugs or drapes in burgundy, and we’ll have bowls of floating leaves on all the tables.

She sealed this letter and, without any clue as to his real address, stored it tightly with the others in her box.

Chapter l8

‘There’s something still not quite right with the painting.’ My father rang first thing one morning. ‘I think we’ll just have one more go.’ It took me half an hour to find the scrap of Babygro, bundled out of sight into a cupboard. I considered bringing toys to keep Sonny transfixed. I could hold a string of plastic teddy bears above him while he posed, but the idea of the studio, its silence broken by the tinkling of electronic Brahms, decided me against it.

When I arrived someone was ringing the bell. I could see him leaning on his finger, determined, and even from behind I recognized the rounded figure of my father’s cousin John.

‘Hello.’ He straightened guiltily. ‘I’m Sarah . . . I’m Michael’s daughter.’

He was looking at me, his eyes round with surprise. ‘Sarah.’ And he began to nod and smile. ‘How very nice to meet you.’

‘And this is Sonny, my . . . Michael’s grandson.’ John’s smile quivered, as if more than one new relative might be too much to take in in a day.

‘He doesn’t appear to be there.’ John looked up at the house.

‘No,’ I agreed, but thought I caught a shadow stepping out of sight against a wall. ‘Was it important?’

John shuffled and turned to look at his car, waiting neatly on a meter. ‘There was something I wanted him to sign.’

I offered to take it in to him, sitting on the flat top of the gatepost to show that I was quite prepared to wait.

As soon as John drove away, beeping as he turned the corner, my father appeared at the door. He looked out, nervous as a bird, and grinned over at me. ‘I thought he’d never go away.’ He took the clean brown envelope that John had given me, tucking it under his arm as if he’d been expecting it.

I had to help him find his glasses. We trawled through magazines, searched under towels and found them in a saucer of dried paint. Sonny started to grizzle. I held him up to the mirror and watched him beam into his eyes. ‘Now you see him,’ I swept him away, ‘now you don’t.’ He gave a throaty chuckle, like a rude old man. ‘Now you see him –’ But I was interrupted by my father scrabbling and cursing as he began a new search for a pen.

‘What’s it about?’

‘The same old thing,’ he muttered, plucking up a biro with a splintered side. ‘Gaglow.’ And I watched, delighted as he set his signature, scrawling across the blank space for his name.

By the time we settled down to sit, the sky was clouding over. It was a thick August afternoon with warm fat drops threatening to fall, and Sonny, whose sleep had been delayed, sank heavily against my arm.

It was impossible to imagine what more there was to do. I had a slanting view, too close and harsh, but even from there the picture looked quite finished. My father stared at it, a brush clenched in one hand, and I waited, the breath short in my throat, for him to come to some decision. He looked from me to it and then to Sonny, his face all strained and burrelled up with pain, and then he stood back, nodding. He mixed new paint in a flurry of activity, and as he stepped forward, raised up on his toes, I saw that he was working on the yellow plaster, uncovered, just above my head. Sonny only sleeps for forty minutes now, I wanted to tell him, but I kept quiet, tense with concentration, feeling my part in the way the paint went on. ‘Is it warm enough?’ he asked, as the rain splashed sideways against the glass, and two lights had to be switched on above our heads.

I nodded and tucked the towelling corners tight around the baby’s feet, feeling his padded palm for warmth. I loved the rain. The sound of it thudding against glass and the day-time gold of the electric light mixing in with grey. I could lie like this for ever, and then I remembered that in another ten minutes my hip would start to ache, and by the end of the afternoon I would be wrung out and miserable with trying to keep still. Natasha had shrieked with triumph when I said the painting needed one last go. ‘What if you had a life?’ she teased me. ‘What would you do then?’

And Kate had taken pity on us all. ‘Sarah and Sonny are the only ones he has left, now we’ve both retired from the modelling world.’ And she laughed and said, ‘So he does need his family, after all.’

I closed my eyes and waited, resting while I had the chance, and when I glanced back at the picture I saw the plaster wall exactly as before. There it was, pale yellow, but now I could see into it, behind it. Green and gold and blue. I could even tell that it had been there for a hundred years. I smiled and wondered what I was going to do if I held firm against another picture. I’d written notes to call my agent, week after week, but had never managed to pick up the phone. It didn’t seem worth leaving Sonny for a three-month tour
of Don’t Forget Your Trousers
. Even if I was lucky enough to get a part.

I lay so still and waited for so long that eventually my father had to suggest a break. It was something I knew he hated to do. He liked to hold up his strength against yours and win. I pulled on the dressing gown quickly to show I was relieved.

‘Did I tell you about the Belgard curse?’ He had gone through to the kitchen and was peering into the envelope to check the papers were still there.

‘No.’ I was half listening out for Sonny, sleeping through the break. ‘What kind of curse?’

‘The woman my uncle married, the prostitute, she was so incensed about the wedding not being grand enough, not taking place at Gaglow as she wished, that she put a curse on the family.’

I felt a small electric shiver run under the skin. ‘For some reason she turned on my grandfather, Wolfgang, blaming him particularly. Not long afterwards he died.’

‘Wait one minute,’ I said, and raced into the studio to check that Sonny hadn’t rolled off on to the floor. He was awake, staring at the window, watching squashed drops of water rolling down the glass. I scooped him up and brought him through. ‘How did he die? Was it immediate?’ And I imagined the long crook of her finger, striking him down.

‘It’s possible she was a gypsy or something,’ my father said, ‘or she came from the South. But I’m not quite sure how he died.’

‘So she wasn’t Jewish?’

‘God, no.’

I laughed. I’d always assumed my father had been the first to look outside his faith.

‘What I’ve been meaning to ask,’ I remembered quickly while he was in the mood, ‘is, tell me about Bina.’

‘The loathsome Bina?’

‘Yes. I mean, was she really so terrible?’

My father thought for a while. ‘Absolutely.’ It was how he liked things to be.

‘But why? There must be some reason.’

I expected a sharp look, a warning to cut out the cod analysis, but he was nodding, mulling over some forgotten news. ‘You know the story about Van Gogh?’

I wasn’t sure. I imagined I did, assuming it was the ancient one about his ear.

‘Well, there was another Vincent who died when he was very young, beautiful, perfect, a blessing to his parents in all ways, and so of course the new Vincent Van Gogh was meant simply as a replacement.’

‘Poor thing. He didn’t stand a chance.’

‘It happens surprisingly often. Well, that’s what happened in my mother’s family. There was another child, who died after six months. Also called Bina. But, of course, it didn’t work. I think when the second Bina was born my grandmother, Marianna, went into a decline, went off to a health spa, could hardly look at her. She was brought up by some governess or other.’

‘How terrible.’

To my surprise he put the kettle on for a second cup of tea.

‘I don’t think she ever knew.’

‘Really?’

‘My grandmother told my mother, right at the very end, just before she died. I remember them crying together, holding hands.’ The kettle whistled as it reached the boil, and as if remembering himself he switched it off and ordered us back to work.

The remainder of the afternoon turned into a struggle. Sonny had woken up refreshed, wanting to be entertained. He wanted to be rocked and kissed and played with, shown the view and taken for a walk. I sang to him as he lay beside me, introduced him to his toes, and wondered why we were needed there at all while layer after peeling layer of plaster went on above our heads.

When we finally got out, the rain had stopped. The clouds were thin and scattered and the sodden heads of flowers lay strewn across the street. I noticed the first fallen leaves burnt brown against the puddles and, breathing in the city smell of raspberry, hot against wet walls, I walked on past my bus stop. Shrubs and bushes were bursting out on to the street, cleared of their dust, and I brushed them with my shoulder to shake the last glass drops of rain against my face. And then the sun came out, streaking the pavement pearl, and the glint of it on the curved roof of a postbox reminded me of the Gaglow letter I’d promised to post. Without slowing I rummaged for it in my bag, hoping to slide it in as I walked past, but the envelope was too wide for the slot and I had to stop and curve it round to make it fit. I could bend it carefully so that it might unfurl in the wide inside without creasing, but as I stopped to free up both my hands I noticed the address. It was a street above Camden Town and I realized that simply by staying on my bus for several extra stops, I could deliver it myself. I pushed the envelope back into my bag and, glancing behind me to check I hadn’t been observed, walked quickly on.

The door was answered by a woman. She had soft grey hair cut into a square, and fragile arms and legs. ‘I have something to give to Johann . . .’ I glanced down at the name ‘. . . John Godber.’

‘John,’ the lady called, ‘John.’

He trod slowly through, ignoring her urgency, and only startling when he saw me. ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I held out the envelope, ‘but I was passing so I brought you this.’

‘Of course, how kind,’ and he insisted, as I’d hoped he would, that I come in.

‘This is Sarah.’ He opened his eyes wide at his wife. ‘Michael’s daughter.’ I could tell from the angle of her head that she’d been told.

Their house was cool and comfortable, and he laid the envelope on a table of dark wood. ‘This is my wife, Elisabeth.’ John introduced us, and she clucked and kissed the air at Sonny as she went out for a tray of tea.

We sat in silence as the pot was left to brew.

‘So you live nearby?’ John asked, and I nodded, saying quickly that I was taking the baby to look at other children on the Heath.

‘Do you have children?’ I asked, and he told me eagerly that they had three, two sons and a daughter, and together they began counting off grandchildren proudly on their hands.

‘And this is your first child?’ Elisabeth asked.

‘Yes, my first.’ I knew that my ringless finger had been caught as I came through the door, and it made the questions stop up politely in their throats.

‘You do look like your grandmother.’ They turned to each other, relieved to have found a subject on which they both felt safe. ‘Very like dear Eva.’ Agreeing, they spent the next ten minutes nodding over it while I kept my head lowered so that they might see the uncanny similarity of our chins.