The Children's Book (65 page)

For a moment, Griselda thought Wolfgang had done them. Then he said

“What have you done to my father? He is
verzaubert
—bewitched. Is he in love with you? People have been speaking—to me and my mother. He has never been like this, never. Have you made him mad?”

Griselda stared at him in horror.

“It isn’t
that
, at all. Not at all.” She thought furiously. “I think you must ask
him.”

“How can I? He is my father. He has always been—rather serious, a little distant. How can I ask him if he is in love with one or two English girls? People have said—spiteful—things to my mother.”

He looked gloomily at the table.

“We want you to let him go,” he said, slowly.

“I only translate—”

“So it is the other, the Dorothy—”

Furies flapped in Griselda’s head. The secret was not hers. She said “There is a secret. It is not mine to tell you.”

“What have you done?”

“Listen,” said Griselda. “It is their secret. If I tell you, it will only be so as to stop you—thinking wrong things. It is a secret.”

“So?”

“She is his daughter. She came to tell him she had found that out. He—he believes her, you can see. They—they are—you see how they are. I only translate,” she was compelled to add, though she was covertly studying the repeated recording of her thin and pale beauty in the sketch-book. She said

“And you are her brother. Half-brother.”

Wolfgang put his head to one side and considered Griselda. She said “I think you should tell him you know. I think—” I think it is all too intense, she wanted to say, and could not. Wolfgang said

“I am glad you are not my sister.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

Griselda flushed and looked away.

“Will you come with me, to him—?” said Wolfgang.

Anselm Stern, confronted by his son, his sketch-book and a deprecatory Griselda, was briefly taken aback. He had been controlling a story, and one of the actors had taken the strings into his own hands. Wolfgang asked, politely and implacably, whether what Griselda said was true. Then he said that his father must speak to his mother, because people had been saying unkind things. He had always intended to speak to her, Anselm said. He had wanted—time to himself, time to think how best to go on, what to say to his sons. He smiled ruefully at Wolfgang.

“Now you know, there is no further reason to hesitate.”

“I’m sorry,” said Griselda.

“Why?”

“It wasn’t my secret.” A child both spoiled, indulged and neglected, she had never before for so long been simply ancillary to someone else’s drama.

“No, it is good,” said Anselm Stern. “Now I reflect, I must thank you.”

Angela Stern sent hand-decorated cards—with wickedly grinning cherubs—to the Pension Susskind to invite everyone—Joachim, Toby, Karl, Griselda and Dorothy—to supper in the Spiegelgarten. Dorothy looked at the cherubs and said that Frau Stern had a sense of humour. She put her hair up, carefully, for the occasion.

Frau Stern received them standing by the fountain. She was larger than her husband, in every direction, and seemed a little older, solid-featured, with a crown of greying fair hair. She wore a lace-trimmed blouse and a full grey skirt, nothing fancy. She shook everyone’s hand, Dorothy’s no longer than any other. She had one of those faces that in repose looks heavy, but can be transformed by a smile, or an eager sense of interest. When she smiled, she resembled Wolfgang, the same wide grin, the same concentrated glee. She served salmon and cucumber, sour cream and potato salad, accompanied by a choice of beer or Riesling. She said that the carvings on the fountain and the mirrors were her own work. Griselda watched her watching Dorothy, when Dorothy was not looking. Dorothy was sitting next to Leon, who said composedly that he had been talking to his brother and was happy to have his news.

When they had finished eating, Angela Stern invited Dorothy to come into the house and look at her work. Everyone—even, by now, the tutors—understood the importance of this. Anselm Stern brought the figure of a black cat out of his pocket and began to dance it on his knee.

“I shall show you my atelier,” said Angela Stern, who spoke English, in her own way. They climbed steep stairs and went into a large, largely empty room, with an easel set up, and two tables of modelled clay heads, some in progress, some finished.

“These are my sons,” said Angela Stern, pointing to three heads of very newborn babies. “Here Wolfgang, here Leon, here Eckhardt, who did not live. I love my sons, and I love my work, and I’m happy to see you in my house, Fräulein Wellwood.”

“Dorothy?”

“Dorothy.”

“It is kind of you to invite me.”

“I do
believe
that we should all be free to love when—where—we must—that we should not be constrained. What we believe and what we feel, you will understand, are not always the same. I—I did not know you—you—existed. I met your mother when she was here. She is a beautiful woman, full of life. She was very unhappy, in that time. We tried to comfort her.

“I believe I
ought
to be happy to see you—Fräulein—Dorothy—and now that I do see you, I believe I
shall
be happy. Come to see us, often. I shall show you my work. This is the room where I am myself. I should like you to know me—me also. I think I need say no more.”

“You are incredibly kind.”

“If there is any fault, it is not yours. These are my sons, as cherubs, and here, beginning to be young men. This is Anselm. I could not model him without a model in his hand. I have never got his look to my own satisfaction. I also do caricatures, and there I do better, I can make a simplified—how do you say—edge—outline of his look—”

Thinking about this conversation, later, Dorothy thought that the older woman was determined both to behave well, and not to be left out. Later still, she came to see that there were many ways in which Angela Stern resembled Olive Wellwood. “This is the room where I am myself.” Dorothy was at an age where she was still amazed to be able to describe to herself the movements of the minds and feelings of others. If you knew how somebody’s mind worked, did it mean you liked them? She was not a person of fierce affections or spontaneous emotions. All this bubbling up of excitement and delight and fear over her found father perturbed her. Angela Stern’s lovingly modelled heads of her boys were like Olive’s family tales—a form of love, a form of separateness.

Good sense is both a curse and a blessing. Dorothy sat in Munich, and thought everything out. If she was to be a doctor, she must return to Todefright and matriculate. She thought briefly about trying to stay in southern Germany and become a doctor there, but German women had more restricted options for study than the British, at that time. And she realised she had no idea what her new-found family would say if she asked to be taken in. And then she realised that she did not want to stay, not yet, not really. She was homesick even if she was happy. She missed both the Tree House and the convenience of Queen’s College, Harley Street and the lectures in Gower Street. There was also the problem of the tutors. Griselda and Karl knew what was going on and had accepted Wolfgang and Leon as proxy cousins. She made a plan. She asked Griselda to tell Toby Youlgreave, in very strict confidence, what had happened. And she asked Karl to tell Joachim Susskind, in even stricter confidence, the same story. They would be part of a circle who knew the truth about Anselm Stern and Dorothy Wellwood, and they would preserve the convention that Dorothy was indeed Dorothy Wellwood, and thus she could go home. She wondered what Toby would think, who had loved her mother so long—she was trying to rethink, revisit, what she surmised of the relations of those two. She rejected the idea
that he might always have known that Dorothy was not Humphry’s child. She would have noticed, if he had looked knowing in any way. He did not. He looked baffled.

And how should she prepare her return—to a certain extent, a climb-down—to Todefright? She wrote a letter to her mother. It took her a long time to write.

Dorothy thought this letter was both a masterpiece of the disingenuous, and a very useful lifeline, cast to Olive, if Olive wanted to grasp it. She then sat down to think about her own fury at Olive, her wish to close her out and punish her. What exactly was she punishing her
for?
For a moment of passion (she supposed it was a moment of passion) with the mysterious and intriguing Anselm? For her own birth? She was glad she had been born, she was contented enough with who she was, even if that person turned out to have a different origin from what she had always supposed. For bringing her up in ignorance, as a Wellwood? What else could a woman in that situation have done? She had not lied to Humphry—possibly could not. They had both loved Dorothy, that she had to admit. What angered her was the
lie
. Those who are lied to feel diminished, set aside, misused. So Dorothy felt. But she was also discovering that knowing about lies that have been told is a form of power. She had power over both Humphry and Olive, because they had lied to her, and she knew. And they did not know how much she knew, and they were fearful. The letter she had written would make them more fearful, more anxious. They
deserved
that. But the letter also, in its naïveté and neutrality, left the door open for everyone to pretend that nothing had happened at all—for them all to know they were pretending, and tell a story together. She pressed the envelope shut, licked the stamp, and carried it to the post.

Charles/Karl was also preoccupied with his double identity. He saw more both of the politically agitated and of the raffish and satirical sides of life in Schwabing than the young ladies did. He sat in the Café Stefa-nie, in the thick smoke and the singing, and listened to psychoanalysts and anarchists preaching ferment. He listened to slogans. “Unity is princely violence, is tyrannical rule. Discord is popular violence, is freedom” (Panizza). Intense analogies were drawn between hidden destructive parts of the soul, and the excitement of peasants and workers in mobs. It was dangerous to deny such impulses—violence, conspiracy, revolution, murder became necessary and desirable as the tyrannical state was opposed and overcome. It was a long way from the polite lucubrations of the Fabians, and even further from the horse-racing, shooting-party circles of the new King, at the edge of which Charles’s father moved—thanks to his German mother’s fortune. Charles was quite intelligent enough to see that he was able to be an anarchist because he was rich. The Munich café thinkers were aesthetically
excited by peasant manifestations of energy—the charivari, the
Bauerntanz
, the Karneval. Karneval and misrule went together, and were glorious. Joachim Susskind mostly listened. Wolfgang said little, though, like his father, he sketched incessantly, beards wagging in passionate dissertation, women’s legs visible under their skirts as they leaned back, applauding. Leon joined in. He discussed the necessity of assassination, almost primly. Karl said he did not see that it was necessary—such detached Acts as there had been—anarchists had killed the President of France, the Prime Minister of Spain, the Empress Elizabeth and the King of Italy—had only led to more repression. There speaks an Englishman, said Leon, not unfriendly. You don’t recognise oppression as we do. You cannot be put in prison for
Unzüchtigkeit
—“obscenity” Joachim translated—or for
lèse-majesté
as our artists regularly are. We are driven to put on our serious plays in private clubs and cabarets. And then, the police come in, and the artists are imprisoned, or banished. Oskar Panizza is in Switzerland and cannot return.

“We shall take you to the new artists’ cabaret, the Elf Scharfrichter. Eleven executioners,” said Joachim. “It’s better in German—the sharp edge of the axe is the bite of the wit.”

Karl was already amazed by the satirical poison and violence of the periodicals,
Jugend, Simplicissimus
, with their drawings at once elegant, wicked, obscene and lively. Black dancing demons. Bulldogs. Women like bats and vampires with black mouths. Leon invited him—as an English anarchist—to admire Simpl’s cartoons on English matters. Leon explained to Charles/Karl that artists in Schwabing felt great sympathy for the oppressed Boers in South Africa. The cartoons preached “Shoot the English in the mouth, where they are most dangerous.” There was a graphic and horrible image of King Edward and a colonial officer stamping on Boers in a concentration camp. “The blood from these devils is befouling my crown,” said the King. “Strong, is it not?” said Leon. “English tourists have tried to get it suppressed. It mocks the Kaiser also. His endless uniforms. His journey to the Holy Land.”