The English Girl (12 page)

‘I don’t know, Stella,’ he tells me then. ‘But one thing I
do
know: that people can believe impossible things. And that so often we close our eyes to things we don’t want to see. People can know things and not know them – both at the same time. I see this every day, with my patients.’

At once, I think of the story in
The Interpretation of Dreams
: the man asleep in his bed, the child who pulled at his arm.
Father, don’t you see that I’m burning?

We come to Maria-Treu-Gasse. I stop, turn to him.

‘This is my street.’

I feel the flicker of panic that I always feel when we part. What happens now? When will I see him again?

‘Next Friday,’ he tells me, ‘they’re playing Beethoven’s Ninth.’

All the troubling things we’ve talked about slide from my mind.

‘Oh. That would be wonderful.’

He kisses me. I feel all the sweetness, all the rightness of his mouth on my mouth. My body still hurts, but I feel a quick surge of desire. I want to make love to him again. Now. At once. Here in the street. To feel his skin against my skin, to have him moving inside me again.

This is the start,
I tell myself.
It’s all just beginning
.

‘Well done,’ I say mechanically, when we get to the end of the page. ‘That was very good, Lukas.’

We’re reading my Rupert annual at the dining-room table, Lukas repeating the English after me, in his solemn, shrill little voice.

But I’m not really paying attention. Honeyed late-afternoon sunlight is filling the room, and I’m warm, rather languorous, lost in a dream of Harri, of his hands moving everywhere over me. Longing for Friday, for him.

Lukas smiles, pleased with my praise.

‘I’ve had a Rupert book before. Fräulein Verity had one,’ he says.

I’m jolted out of my dream.

‘Did she?’

‘I wish she had written that letter,’ he says. ‘A letter with my name on.’

There’s a dark silk skein of sadness wrapped around his voice.

‘Oh, Lukas. I’m sorry.’

‘Why are you sorry? It isn’t your fault.’

He’s staring down at the book, absently tracing out the picture, which shows Rupert in his usual yellow-checked trousers and scarf, and his policeman friend, Constable Growler.

‘What happened to Fräulein Verity? Did somebody hurt her?’ he asks.

The question surprises me.

‘No. No, I’m sure they didn’t. Why do you think that, Lukas?’

He moves his face close to mine, to whisper. His breath has a scent of apples, and is soft on my skin.

‘She was
crying
,’ he tells me.

‘Crying? When was she crying?’

His face is stained with bright colour, like Marthe’s face when she’s nervous.

‘I was playing in my cupboard…’

I think of the cupboard in the hallway, where Janika keeps her brushes and mops. A child could easily hide in it, and no one could tell they were there.

‘And I heard a sound of crying,’ he says, ‘and I went to her room and peeped in. She was sitting on her bed and the tears were dripping onto her quilt.’

‘Lukas. You shouldn’t go looking in other people’s rooms,’ I tell him, rather severely.

‘Her door was a little bit open…’

‘But you shouldn’t
spy
on people.’

‘I never saw her again,’ he tells me. ‘A bad person must have hurt her.’

‘Lukas – people can cry for all sorts of reasons…’

He ignores this.

‘If I’d been there, I would have stopped him,’ he says.

‘But I don’t think that’s what happened…’

I push back his hair, which is flopping over his face. It’s a very pale blond, almost white. Mine was that colour, when I was his age. I know this because my mother preserved a single lock of my infant hair; it’s in the family album, in a little cellophane sleeve. I feel a quick pang of homesickness, thinking of my mother.

Lukas runs his finger over the page, and the picture of Constable Growler.

‘I’d like to be a policeman, Fräulein Stella,’ he tells me.

‘Well, you can be, of course, when you’re big. If you work very hard at your lessons.’

‘I’d be a really good policeman. I’d catch all the bad people and put them in prison,’ he says.

‘Yes, I’m sure you would.’

He turns a page of the book. He points to the weird-looking Raggety, a little troll made out of twigs.

‘Look, this is a really bad person,’ he says. ‘He’s got such a horrible face.’

‘Well – he
might
be bad. The thing is, Lukas, you can’t always tell by looking.’

‘Of course you can,’ he assures me.

‘No, Lukas. Bad people can look quite ordinary. Just like you or me.’

The sun has left the room now. Quite suddenly, it’s twilight, and I get up to switch on the lamp. Spidery shadows reach out to us from the corners of the room, edging across the parquet floor, each minute a little closer.

‘You really can’t tell from the picture,’ I say again. Feeling he needs to know this – that this is an important lesson for life. ‘You can only find out by listening to the story. Sometimes, you can’t tell if somebody’s good or bad till the story ends,’ I say.

But he won’t accept this. He frowns.

‘It shouldn’t be so hard to tell, Fräulein Stella,’ he says.

Janika is singing in Hungarian. Her music is quite different to the music I know; this isn’t like Rainer singing Schubert. There’s a wildness in her singing. It makes you think of harsh, far-off places where winter lingers; of the loneliness of voices heard over water, and the note of lamentation you can sometimes hear on the wind.

Heat from the range wraps around me as I go through the kitchen doorway. Janika is at the sink, perched on a high wooden stool. She’s peeling potatoes, now and then dipping her knife in the sink, to sluice away bits of potato skin.

‘Fräulein Stella. Would you like some hot chocolate?’

‘No, thank you, Janika. I just wanted to ask you something.’

‘Ask away, Fräulein Stella.’

‘Lukas talks a lot about Fräulein Verity,’ I say, and hesitate. I have a sudden misgiving, remembering how anxious Janika seemed when we talked about this before. ‘He’s upset that she left so suddenly. That she never sent him a letter after she went…’

Janika glances round sharply at me, but doesn’t stop her potato-peeling.

‘Well, I think she did write, Fräulein Stella. I think she sent several letters, with pictures of London,’ she says.

‘Lukas told me she didn’t.’

Janika looks over my shoulder at something for a long moment.

‘The thing is, Frau Krause decided not to show the letters to Lukas. She talked to me about it.’

Her voice is fragile and hushed.

I’m shocked.

‘So Fräulein Verity wrote to him – and Frau Krause never told him?’

Janika nods.

‘She felt the letters might upset him. That they would just remind him,’ she says.

My mind is full of protest. Marthe should have read Lukas the letters; she shouldn’t have kept them from him.

Janika’s eyes are veiled. There’s a look in her face that’s hard to read: I wonder if it is shame. But I don’t understand why she should feel this – when none of it was her fault.

I long to ask again about the Krauses’ reason for sacking Verity. But I sense that Janika won’t tell me anything more.

We are quiet for a moment. I can hear the flurry of waterdrops from Janika’s knife and her hands. She hums a fragment of song, half under her breath.

‘That song you keep singing, Janika. I was wondering what it’s about…’

Janika turns to face me; her soft brown eyes are veiled.

‘It’s about a young woman who loses her sweetheart,’ she tells me. ‘She dies, and they bury her under a willow tree. There seem to be a lot of songs that tell of something like that.’

‘Yes, there do,’ I say.

‘We used to sing that song in my village.’

‘I’d love to know more about your village, Janika.’

‘What would you like to know?’ she asks me.

‘Tell me what you enjoyed about living there…’

She thinks for a moment. A small smile plays on her face.

‘Well, the storks would come in April,’ she tells me. ‘That was a special moment for us. We’d see their great procession over the sky, their legs as red as sealing wax, and they’d make their nests in our chimney pots. They were birds of good omen to us. We thought they brought us good luck.’

I’m intrigued by omens.

‘What did people believe in, in your village, Janika?’

‘The Good Lord and Our Lady and all the saints,’ she tells me. ‘Everyone went to church on Sundays. Dressed in their very best clothes…’ She thinks for a moment. ‘But people were often frightened. Back in my village, there were so many things to be afraid of,’ she says.

‘Afraid?’

‘People feared the evil eye. If a good thing happened, you wouldn’t boast about it, so as not to attract the evil eye. And we thought it was dangerous to praise a child too highly,’ she says.

I understand this. The fear that a good thing will be snatched from you, if you talk about it too much.

‘If your child was sick, you would bathe him in coaly water,’ she goes on, ‘and wipe him dry with the hem of your apron, to avert the evil eye.’

‘Oh.’ This fascinates me. ‘Tell me more, Janika.’

She pauses in her potato peeling. In the silence between us, you can hear the shuffle and shifting of coals in the range.

‘There was a story about our village,’ she says then. ‘My grandmother told it to me. Maybe you’d like to hear it?’

‘Oh, please.’

‘Well. There was once an old man in our village who kept himself to himself, who lived on the edge of the forest. My grandmother knew him.’

There’s something secret in her voice. Goosebumps come all over my arms, like when you hear the best fairytales.

‘One winter, a wolf came close to the village and killed a lot of the sheep. It was a great big beast, but cunning: no one could get near it. Then one of the farmers shot it – just catching its paw, just wounding it, so it limped off into the trees. There was a trail of black blood in the snow, there were great black gobbets of blood.’ Her voice has a thrill in it, sending shivers through me. ‘Later, they found the old man in his hut on the edge of the forest. He was dead, he’d bled to death from a terrible wound to his leg. And after that the sheep were safe … My grandmother told this to me.’

‘Oh, goodness me.’

‘So, Fräulein Stella. What do people fear where you come from? Do they fear the werewolf and the evil eye?’

I think to myself,
What do people fear in England? What do people fear in Brockenhurst?

‘I don’t think they fear those kinds of things. You know – unseen things. Well, not quite in that way.’ I think for a moment. ‘I think they believe that bad things won’t happen as long as you are reasonable. As long as you are sensible. People believe a lot in common sense, in England,’ I say.

Janika is thoughtful.

‘The world is a strange place, Fräulein Stella. We don’t understand the half of it,’ she says.

‘No, I suppose not.’

But she can hear my hesitation. She can tell I don’t share her sense of the mysteriousness of things.

‘When you’re young and lovely like you,’ she tells me, ‘the world is yours for the taking, and you think you can understand it. But as you get older, the world becomes stranger,’ she says.

I’m still thinking about her story. I don’t believe it, of course. Don’t believe it really happened – not quite in that way. But it still fascinates me.

I think of my conversation with Lukas.
It shouldn’t be so hard to tell
.

‘The man who was the werewolf, who did all those terrible things. Did your grandmother really know him?’

She nods.

‘What did he look like, Janika? What kind of a man was he? Was there anything different about him?’

She frowns slightly.

‘She said there was nothing you’d notice. He was scruffy, but very polite. He had his dog and his vegetable patch. He liked a pipe and a glass of
korte
in the evening,’ she says. ‘
Korte
is our pear brandy.’

‘So there was nothing different at all?’

‘Not so as you’d notice. My grandmother said he was just an ordinary man.’

‘Oh.’

As I get up to go, I’m aware of the way she glances at me, the questioning look in her eyes.

‘I was wondering – I hope you don’t mind me asking, Fräulein Stella – but do you have a young man in Vienna? Are you stepping out with someone?’

‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

She smiles: she’s pleased with herself.

‘I thought as much. You’ve got that glow,’ she tells me.

I worry she’ll tell Marthe – and I’m not quite ready for that.

‘The thing is, Janika – I haven’t talked to Frau Krause yet,’ I say.

I see the doubt that shadows her face. I can tell this really worries her.

‘It’s just all so new,’ I tell her hastily. ‘It’s like that thing you told me, about the evil eye. When a good thing happens, sometimes you want to keep it close for a while – to keep it secret.’

Janika nods, as though accepting this. But I can tell she’s still a little anxious; she puts up a hand and fingers the crucifix at her throat.

‘And is he a kind man, your sweetheart?’ she says.

‘Yes. Very kind.’

‘You cherish him, that young man of yours,’ she tells me.

I smile. This seems so obvious.

‘Oh, I do, of course I do.’

I leave her peeling the potatoes and singing her song of lost love.

As we climb the stairs to the attic room, the music is still in my mind – Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its ecstatic choral setting of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’. I can hear the high triumphant voices.

He closes the door to the room behind us.

Today, I am bolder. I go to him and start to unbutton his shirt, push it off his shoulders. When I press my face to his neck, I breathe in his scent of cedar and the musk of his skin. I move my hand down his body, and feel him harden as I encircle him with my hand. I hear his breathing quicken, and this delights me.

He pulls me down onto the mattress. He rests his hand between my thighs; he flutters his fingers, startling me. I feel the thrill go through me. My back suddenly arches; I hear my voice crying out. He moves on top of me, moves gently in me; this time, there’s only the faintest thread of pain. I feel fluid, open, part of him.