The Folding Star (55 page)

Paul smiled wistfully. ‘I mustn’t exaggerate my innocence. You probably know about the Rexists, who were the French-speaking fascists in this country, and of course there were various Flemish groups of Nazi sympathisers. I think I just absorbed my parents’ contempt for them, as a child does – though the picture wasn’t entirely clear: several people on my mother’s side of the family welcomed the idea of our becoming part of a vast new Germany. It’s too complicated to explain. Anyway, I don’t need to explain. Many of the Nazis went straight into the local militia the Germans raised. I remember a boy called Frank, who’d been an assistant at our shop and played with me when I was little, coming in one day in uniform and shouting “Heil Hitler” when I opened the door.’ Paul muttered the infamous salute in a half-suppressed belch. ‘Also, how the demand for purple ribbon dried up abruptly after that. So I had some idea what might be going on. School was full of gossip and rumour, of course, and I learned about all sorts of things there that were never mentioned at home – often, it must be admitted, because they were completely untrue. My recollection is that you never knew if you could trust somebody.’ I looked at him steadily, with a renewed sense of how much he wanted to trust me; but he avoided my eye, his gaze wandered nervily in the gloomy oblong of the window.

‘One day at breakfast my father told me we were having some other children to stay. A boy of about my age, about fifteen, which I wasn’t altogether pleased about, and a rather younger girl. I was told I had to look after them, as they had left their families and would be very lonely and unsure of things. The boy would be coming to school with me and I remember being very anxious about having to introduce a stranger to my own rather exclusive little group. I clung to the thin excuse that he was apparently a cousin, though one so infinitely distant that I had never heard of him before. But I needn’t have worried: he turned out to be very bright indeed and had read more books and seen more American films than anyone I’d met. He was actually a great asset and if anything enhanced my standing with my friends, by association, as it were. He had to share my bedroom, and he talked all night – all about books: I know it sounds unlikely.’

‘Oh, not to me,’ I said quietly; and he smiled.

‘The girl, I can tell you, was a very different matter. She seemed utterly lost, a little dark-haired thing, sunk in herself; at night we used to hear her crying in her room and my mother going in to comfort her. I’m afraid I probably neglected her, I left her to do tasks in the kitchen, where she seemed happiest. She gave the impression of living in another world. Of course she was terribly homesick, and she had the curious habit of not answering to her name, until the second or third time you called her, which was unsettling to my new-found self-importance.’

‘What was she called?’

‘She was called after St Augustine’s mother: Monica. But as you will have guessed that was not her real name. I’m amazed now to think how long it took me to realise that we were sheltering two Jewish children, and how confidently the boy disguised the fact. Actually he was full of confidence; in some odd way he was able to block out what was going on by concentrating intensely on his school work and living so much in books. I think he’d read all the Waverley Novels except one, which had been stolen from the library. But … Monica somehow knew from the start that she had lost everything. She was so quiet because she was in constant fear of giving herself away. They had false papers, false ration-books, and school uniforms run up by my father – that was what the visitors were always taking away, of course, children’s clothes with the forged papers hidden in their linings. It turned out that my parents were part of an underground network that helped thousands of Jewish children to disappear, or change identity, when their parents gave them up.’

‘Or they’d have been deported …’

‘Exactly. It makes me shiver after fifty years. And they didn’t all get away with it – children don’t have that much discipline, they can’t remain in the land of pretence for ever. The monks and the other masters of the various schools were playing with high explosives. They risked their lives to save the children, but the children actually had the masters’ lives in their hands as well. If a hidden Jewish child was found in school by the Gestapo, neither the child nor the master who was deemed responsible was ever seen again. Personally I wouldn’t want to place so much trust in a frightened or bereaved teenager – but what could they do when it was their only chance?’

‘I’m afraid you’re going to say something about Monica and the boy.’

‘No, they were among the lucky ones.’ He gave me a surprisingly bright grin. ‘Our little threesome became quite close, in time. They stayed on with us until after the war, until we knew for certain that their parents had been … exterminated. We became inseparable, in that way that teenagers do – with a secret language, each of us half in love with the others, and full of rivalry too, which sometimes burst out in dreadful rows. Those were the occasions when I first heard my own faults described without mercy. Of course our all being under the same roof made it very intense and inescapable. There being three of us gave us a sense of mysterious power, to ourselves and to outsiders. It also made it hard to do anything independently, or in a couple without the third. I don’t know if you’ve experienced anything similar.’

I rocked my head and raised my eyebrows to say, ‘Have I ever.’

‘You’ve guessed the point of the story, I’m sure’ – and for once I thought I had.

‘Well, Monica I suppose must have been Lilli.’

Paul gave a sighing smile, and looked down, so that I wondered for a moment if I was wrong. He said, ‘I won’t pretend I wasn’t fairly anxious when she came back. We’d lost touch after I’d gone to England. She went back to the country, and married very soon. It was natural, she wanted her new life. But within a few days we’d each remembered how the other ticked; we were both somewhat raw from our bereavements, we had disagreements, just as we always had. To be honest, it has often been very difficult for us. The most important thing was that Marcel got on so well with her. I could see he was a way for her to come to terms with the city again, at least as far as it was possible for her to. They took each other for long walks, which must have brought back terrible thoughts for her, the whole mood of those years, and the subterfuge that had allowed her to survive when all her family had been annihilated. She used to come back in with Marcel, exhausted, gripping his hand tight – obviously he didn’t realise what he meant to her. She never said so to me, indeed she’s never spoken of it at all, but I’m sure he helped her to see things through his eyes – I mean, with a certain freshness, and optimism. He seemed to forget his own woes, too, when he had her to protect him.’

I thought, why did no one tell me? I might never have found out. I scurried back over various semi-drunken mealtimes, thinking I might have said something awful. ‘And what happened to the boy?’

Paul looked at me kindly, uncertainly. I saw he was still thinking of Marcel. Then, ‘Oh, the boy. Well, we remained great friends, we went to university together. If I tell you he became a schoolteacher,’ said Paul, with a slight amused hesitation, ‘I will probably have told you enough.’

In fact it took me a few seconds of clumsy verification. I said nothing, but smiled and nodded slowly to acknowledge my surprise and then my lack of any reason to be surprised. So the two former orphans both looked after children – well, that seemed right, it was the form some unalterable need had taken. I heard the familiar crack of a board, and half-turned to see that Helene was standing in the doorway that gave on to the stairs. Her hand was on the door-knob and she leaned into the room as though waiting for a sign that she was not disturbing us. I wondered how long she had been standing and listening. Paul must have seen her; that hint of amusement perhaps came from having her there at the dénouement of her father’s story.

She went round the desk, behind Paul’s chair, and leant forward to embrace him, her arms crossed loosely under his chin, her cheek pressed to his temple. The gesture seemed full of her fresh adult confidence, though it was also the embrace with which a child cajoles a stern but sentimental old relative. She stayed there, looking up at me with a glow, until Paul patted her hand and she slowly stood back. I shared their quiet pleasure that I was in on the secret; as well as feeling the initiate’s disadvantage, the tacit admission of how clueless I had been before.

I got up more suddenly than I’d meant to, and in my customary reflex stared out of the window, at the fog which annihilated the street and at the same time cast a faint illumination.

‘I nearly told you before,’ Helene said, ‘when we went for that walk, do you remember? But you know they never talk about it – Daddy and Lilli don’t – and so it never seems quite right for me to either.’

‘I’m just so glad they’re here at all,’ I said after a moment, though with a sense that I shouldn’t now pretend to like Maurice more than I did. I saw how the schoolboy role of know-all and competitor had lasted and soured like a tough old jacket. It was hateful of me, but I began to be irritated by the ubiquitous power of the unsaid, and by the generous little enactment of Helene’s gratitude, the stooping hug that said for them the crisis was over – not still waiting to happen, somewhere along the invisible roads.

‘Any news of Luc?’ said Matt, in a tone that for the first time admitted tender concern and caught me unawares. My voice cracked under the light pressure of sympathy.

‘Nothing,’ I said, and walked away from him, my mouth turned down at the corners like a child in the silence before a wail. I stood looking over his twisted bedding, sucking in deep breaths; wondering abstractly who’d been sleeping here. Matt kept away from me, stacked up tapes with the noisy briskness of someone pretending to do housework. After a while I went over to him and gave him a kiss. ‘Actually I’m terribly hungry,’ I said.

He gave his crooked smile of relief. ‘Run out and get some burgers.’

‘Okay. I don’t have any money.’ And I dug with an inverted kind of pride into my jeans pocket and displayed a palmful of coins that would buy nothing, the change one expects a beggar or busker to be grateful for. Matt did something similar, though he brought out a bookie’s roll of banknotes with large rudimentary sums jotted on the top one. He pulled a couple of thousands off and tucked them into my waistband, as if I were a stripper; then kissed me again.

When I got back with the warm polystyrene boxes, he was on the phone. ‘Yeah … that’s right … the American guy … yes, really sexy … he’s not a jerk … oh, a jock … yeah, he’s a jock all right …’ He gave me a wink, head cocked to hold the receiver whilst he tipped the packeted condiments out of the bag. ‘Okay, here he is … Ed, yeah … This one’s for you,’ he said, a finger on the secretary’s hold button.

‘Who is it?’

‘Some guy from Ostend.’

‘What’s he want?’

‘You’re an American college-boy, okay, he just needs talking off.’ I ducked away puzzled. ‘Come on, he’s paying good money. His dick’s in his hand. Just tell him how sexy you are.’ Matt held the receiver out to me, and I gestured wanly at my cheeseburger, already cooling after its journey from the Bishop’s Palace. ‘Eat while you work,’ he said.

I sat down. ‘But I’m not American …’ There was no help for it. ‘Hello?’ I said in a suspicious growl.

‘Oh hi! Is that
Ed
, right?’ The man was speaking in a heavy American accent himself, but with homely Flemish vowels.

‘Yep.’ I settled myself and turned my head so that I couldn’t see Matt. The scope for confusion was so great that I found myself taking it quickly and self-mockingly, like something done as a dare. I’d never rung a sex-talk line – I didn’t know what the conventions were.

‘So, where are you from, Ed?’ the man from Ostend asked with patient excitement.

‘Oregon,’ I said, wondering if it sounded as wrong to him as it did to me. I remembered doing
Our Town
as the school play, only Dawn being able to sustain the accent amid a medley of Yogi Bear and something oddly like Yorkshire.

‘Oh great. That’s the Rocky Mountains, right?’

‘We have the Rockies.’ Though doubts immediately formed.

‘And lumberjacks, don’t tell me, that’s really wild.’

‘Uh-huh. Though I’m a student, remember.’

‘Right! That’s very sexy. But you must know one or two lumberjacks?’

‘Well, one or two, I guess.’ And I heard myself give a guilty laugh, as if I really were confessing to some rough weekends in the Oregon woods. I reached for my burger, and balanced it up in my hand so as not to shed the loose onion-rings and swell of ketchup.

‘That’s great. So what do you major in?’ I’d no idea there was so much background in phone-sex. I heard a little catch in his breath and wondered if that was what he got off on.

‘Oh, let’s not talk about boring old work!’ I said, beginning to feel more at home in my accent, which had swerved irresponsibly southwards and seemed to have settled on hunky Bobby in
Dallas
for its model. There was a pause, in which I could hear faint rustling sounds. I took a bite of tepid beef and bread.

‘Well, Ed,’ and the voice was slower and more serious. ‘Aren’t you gonna tell me what you look like, and you know, what you’re doing to yourself?’

I chewed frantically. ‘Sure, sure. Well, what shall I start with?’

‘You’re blond, I think your friend said?’

‘I’m blond. Very blond as a matter of fact. And I’m pretty muscular, like, I work out a lot, swim a lot, all that shit.’ I seemed to be turning into Rex Stout. ‘Yeah, I’ve got a washboard stomach.’

‘A washbore?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Oh …’

‘Or so the guys all say.’

‘Tell me what you weigh, Ed,’ he breathed, as though just to hear the figure would be the same as having my real weight on top of him. I knew I couldn’t do the conversion from stones to pounds. I supposed 140 pounds must be 10 stone, which was so much lighter than me as to sound almost anorexic.

‘One hundred sixty-five pounds,’ I said masterfully.