The House at Tyneford (54 page)

I watched the crowd, spying at last Margot and Robert. They came over to us and the men exchanged pleasantries, while I watched Margot, noticing that she was quiet and a little pale. Catching my eye, she smiled. The five-minute bell summoned us to our seats, and then somehow the four of us were sitting in the auditorium. I found that I was shaking and Daniel reached out to squeeze my hand. It was not an Opera House but a palace, a cathedral to music—crimson and gold and bright with light. The audience clapped and hushed. I fidgeted and fanned myself with the programme, almost hearing Gretta’s goose-hiss of disapproval. The lights dimmed and the theatre filled with familiar faces. There in the stage box was Herr Finkelstein, still thrilled at being mistaken for the balding baron, and Frau Goldschmidt sweating in her fur, but refusing to surrender it to an unknown fate in the cloakroom, and there, at last, was Julian, leaning forward in his seat, listening. He scarcely seemed to breathe, taut with anticipation. We clapped the conductor, and then little Jan Tibor strode onto the stage. Only he wasn’t little Jan any longer. This was no phantom, but a slight, white-haired man with that hush of authority possessed only by dictators, lion tamers and conductors. He beckons the soloist onto the stage and out strolls Anna. She looks exactly as she did when I last saw her—a beautiful woman of forty-five—but in her hand she clasps a viola. This is not Anna. This is my niece, Juliana.

I glance down at the programme open on my knee.

This music belongs to my family. Little Jan Tibor, who used to feed lettuce to the tortoise and who played parlour concerts for the aunts, making Anna’s piano sing and cry out in pleasure at its own beauty, has written this for us. I inhale with the orchestra and the world pauses on the upbeat: then the baton lash and sound swirls. Green and blue waves of strings whirl and soar. A flute, clear as a water trickle, is echoed in a deeper stream of cellos and then, at last, Juliana’s viola, deep and sweet and rich as honeyed wine. Her music fills my ears and lungs. The allegro moves into the waltz and I am dancing at the Opera Ball with Kit as Anna sings and I am dizzy with champagne and there is the tinkle of breaking glass. Jan conducts the orchestra with taut fury, pulling from them a spiralling kaleidoscope of sound, and Juliana bows higher and higher and then, on the edge of the precipice, Jan holds them back with a twist of his finger and soothes the strings into sighing diminuendo.

Now the slow movement. The audience waits. This is what they’ve all come to hear. Juliana sets down her Stradivarius and picks up a small rosewood viola. The audience scrutinises this peddler’s fiddle—a collective wrinkling of noses. It’s more suited to a schoolroom or a subway than the grand Opera House. Jan raises his baton and brings it down in a whiplash and it begins, a melody muted and strange, a song of a white page.

I reach for my sister’s hand and listen to my niece draw music from the strings. She sings of the novel inside the viola and its unwritten story. Only I know that the novel in the viola is not blank. I dried the pages and before I sealed them back inside, I filled them one by one with my story. Those pages are covered in words and the novel in the viola is now a palimpsest. After the concert tonight, I shall write the last page and slip it into the viola.

Somewhere a clock ticks backward and midnight is unstruck. Juliana plays and plays and it is every time at once. Burt is fishing in the
Lugger
on the Danube at dawn, and Mrs. Ellsworth and Hilde-gard bake a game pie together in the small kitchen of our old apartment. And always I love two men.

Tonight I shall dream of Tyneford House. As I lay down to sleep, I shall see the house as it was that first summer. The dog roses tangled around the back door. The horse in the stable yard. Teeth grinding, grinding. The scent of magnolia and salt. And then I shall wake inside my dream. I am Elise again. Alice rests and everybody lives. My hands are white and smooth, unmarked by age spots. I stand on the lawn and listen to the call of the sea, the knock of sailboats in the bay. I run down to the beach. My feet are sinking into the pebbles and the water slaps the shore. The sun shines and there is a boy on the beach. An English man-boy. He stands in the white surf. He waits for me there, smiling, always smiling, and he waits to kiss me. I taste salt water on my tongue. Salt water—tears and a journey. And above it all, the crash of the sea.

T
he village of Tyneford is based upon the ghost village of Tyneham on the Dorset coast. People lived in Tyneham and Worbarrow Bay for more than a thousand years, but even during the 1930s it was a remote and secret place, far away from either main roads or rail and its lanes separated from the outside world by a series of wooden gates. The Elizabethan manor was celebrated as one of the most beautiful in England: an exquisite house hewn from golden Purbeck stone. Life in the valley continued virtually unchanged for millennia: men fished for mackerel in the bay and women worked in the fields or the great house owned by the Bond family, who had been in possession of the estate for several hundred years.

Then, in the midst of the Second World War, everything changed. The War Office requisitioned the entire estate for military occupation. A letter was sent on 16th November 1943 informing the villagers that their homes were to be taken and they had one month to leave. Most presumed they’d be back after Christmas and planted up their vegetable gardens in readiness for their return. In any case, Churchill promised that their homes would be returned at the end of the war. The villagers pinned a note on the door of the church as they departed, asking the army: “Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.”

The army (British and American) did not treat the village kindly. They used the cottages as target practice, shelling the walls and firing at the windows. The ancient lime avenue was felled and a fire started in the medieval west wing. But worse was to come. At the end of the war, Churchill reneged on his promise: the village was not returned, but instead requisitioned permanently. The people never came home and the cottages decayed into ruins. The Elizabethan manor was partially demolished during the 1960s and remains in a restricted military area, far away from curious eyes.

Tyneham is now a “ghost village.” The army permit access to certain parts of it during the year, and it is a strange and melancholy place—somewhere that has haunted me since childhood. I have always wanted to fill it with people again, even if only in my imagination, and show it as it might have been. While many of the places are real, the people of Tyneford are imaginary—although I am indebted to Lilian Bond’s elegiac account of her childhood in the great house.

Despite the sadness of Tyneham’s history, the place is unique. So many villages along the Dorset coast bear the marks of modern life, while the landscape around Tyneham remains unchanged. It has never been subject to intensive farming methods, either during the “dig for Britain” campaign or afterward, and remains a period landscape from the 1940s with small, hedged fields. The cottages lie in ruins, but in many ways the army’s occupation has preserved as much as it has destroyed. During a damp August afternoon, I saw a peregrine falcon and a nightingale as well as countless wildflowers. Abandoned by man, it has been reclaimed by nature.

Elise Landau is inspired by my great-aunt Gabi Landau, who, with the help of my grandmother Margot, managed to escape Europe by becoming a “mother’s help” for an English family during the late 1930s. Many refugees, particularly young girls from affluent, bourgeois households, escaped this way on a “domestic service visa”—swapping cosseted and comfortable lives for the harsh existence of English servants. Like Elise, Gabi was desperately homesick and missed her sister, Gerda, who emigrated to the United States. The two women did not meet for more than thirty years, and when they were reunited—on the Liverpool docks—they did not recognise one another.