The One I Was (34 page)

Something there, perhaps in the play of light and shadows, seemed to fascinate him. He gave a smile that seemed to wash away the haggardness from his features. For a whole minute he observed whatever it was on the wall. Max turned and cocked his head, giving a single gentle whine. Then Benny closed his eyes and sighed.

Sarah looked at me.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen this happen before.’

‘But what was he seeing?’

‘I don’t know. Some people think it’s a chemical reaction in the brain as it closes down. Or another reaction to the morphine. Or the effects of an undiagnosed bladder infection, though I’m pretty sure Benny hasn’t got one of those.’ I hesitated, not sure how to put the other alternative. ‘Others say that people are having some kind of spiritual experience.’

And others yet said there was more to it than that, that the dying were seeing those who’d died before and gone ahead. I just didn’t know.

‘He looked …’ Sarah seemed to search for the right word deep in her heart. ‘Joyful. I came in to tell you that the doctor is coming.’

As we watched him Benny seemed to fall deeper and deeper into sleep. Sarah and I stayed with him. After an hour had passed Sarah said we should remove the oxygen mask. I agreed. Sarah dozed for a few hours in her armchair while I watched. This was my job: watching and waiting. Perhaps even welcoming death when it came because I’d made sure that my patient was comfortable and at peace.

I moistened his mouth. And I talked to him in a low voice. I told him that Max was still curled up on the bed at his feet. I told him what had happened with Cathal. And I told him about my lost chance at having a child.

‘I didn’t want to admit to James how terrible the miscarriage made me feel,’ I whispered to the silent Benny. ‘I didn’t want him to see how sad I was. I pretended it was a relief not to have to sell my flat. I
hate
my flat. I was looking forward to moving into a little house with James and the baby. And a dog.’

I hadn’t known I’d felt like this until now.

Then Sarah woke and I slept until mid-morning, washing quickly and resuming my vigil with Benny.

The doctor arrived. Benny’s eyelids flickered as he examined him and made sure that we had all the drugs we might need.

‘Though he seems to be drifting quite gently away. Goodbye, Benny. It’s been a pleasure knowing you.’ He squeezed his hand. Benny made a sound that might have been an attempt to return the farewell.

I moistened his lips again while Sarah showed the doctor out. He seemed to regain a last spark of life.

‘Sarah … truth.’

‘You want to tell Sarah about what happened between Rudi and Benny?’

He nodded.

‘I’ll show her what you wrote. As soon as she comes back upstairs.’

‘Important.’ he murmured. ‘File, Georg Lange.’

‘Your father, Georg. We’ll read that one too.’ He muttered something else and I leant over him to hear.

‘Baby. Sorry.’ I was puzzled. Then I realized he had heard me earlier on when I’d whispered the story of my lost pregnancy.

He fell back into deep sleep.

When Sarah reappeared I explained what Benny had asked and took out the laptop to bring up the file. ‘It’s about his childhood, something he needs you to know.’

She gave a little smile. ‘I don’t need to look at that.’

Awareness came to me suddenly. ‘You knew he wasn’t really a Jewish refugee?’ She looked away. ‘You guessed? Or perhaps you overheard something when he was dreaming?’

‘It was something Lisa said, years ago. I came into the room unexpectedly and they were talking. They didn’t hear me. Lisa told him that just because he wasn’t Jewish didn’t mean he couldn’t help Jewish people and other refugees.’

‘Lisa knew?’

‘We must have been the only two who did. It shouldn’t make any difference to me,’ she said.

Then I realized. ‘You’re Jewish, aren’t you, Sarah?’

She looked at me and I saw it was the truth.

‘My mother …’ She took a breath. ‘My mother was three when the Germans came to Prague. She survived because a camp guard took pity on her and threw her over a barbed wire fence. A farmer hid her. But after the war she weighed the same as a child half her age.’ And Benny, Sarah’s beloved employer, a boy never at risk of such persecution, had taken one of the valuable spots on the Kindertransport.

‘Benny was just a child. But his father …’ She shuddered. ‘Perhaps his work ultimately made it easy for them to send my mother and grandparents to those camps.’

‘Let’s read the other file.’

We sat together at the dressing table. From time to time I lifted my head to see whether Sarah had finished a paragraph before I scrolled down further. Her expression was serious when I looked at her.

*

Only lately have I steeled myself to research my real father, Georg Lange. By good fortune none of the papers relevant to him were incinerated in air raids or destroyed during the Russian advance.

        
My early childhood recollections of Georg are of a man who loved his job and his family. But my mother died. My father came under intense pressure at work. He was irascible at mealtimes and quick to reprimand me.

        
I don’t know how much his political bosses told Georg of their plans for using the German railway system to further their new order. By 1939, my father must surely have suspected that something sinister was subsuming his beloved railway.

        
Whatever the reason for his bad moods, it was partly owing to my fear of my father that I left home the afternoon of the Kindertransport. Once settled in England I assumed that my father wouldn’t have missed me.

        
Courtesy of police records recently placed on the Internet which a researcher has found for me, I now know this wasn’t true. Georg Lange was reported to the Gestapo on several occasions between 1939 and 1943. Rumours flew around that the mysterious disappearance of his son had turned his mind, making him question his
loyalty to the Fatherland. He’d been overheard muttering about the loss of a child being more painful than any loss of national pride. Several of his colleagues, questioned by the police, stated that he’d also stopped wearing his Party pin, the little badge on his lapel. He made negative comments after witnessing the deportation of elderly Jews from a Berlin station.

        
Georg resigned from the railway and took up a job as a hospital orderly. The Gestapo were still watching him closely, possibly waiting to arrest him. But Georg died in the bombing raid before any action was taken. I am saddened at this violent end, but relieved he was never tortured and lined up against a wall, or sent to a camp.

        
I am proud to claim Georg Lange as my father.

        
I’ve never been a religious man, but I hope I might see the people I’ve lost to death again after I die. Sometimes I already seem to see them in front of me, their voices calling to me. Perhaps I am simply the victim of changes to brain chemistry caused by cancer and approaching death or by drugs. It’s really very interesting: a subject on which I might have liked to write or produce a documentary:
Deathbed visitations: hallucinatory or truly spiritual?

        
I have wound up my affairs. The house will be sold and the money given to various refugee charities and other causes. I think Harriet would understand that it is time to sever the threads binding us to Fairfleet. Let a new family come here and fill the house with noise.

        
I have never felt more completely myself: Rudi Lange, known to some as Benny Gault.

*

I glanced at Sarah. She had finished reading, too, and was staring out of the window.

‘He’d started writing so much again just before you joined us here, Rosamond. He’d stopped for some time while he was ill. I worried he was depressed. Then the laptop appeared.’ Her expression grew fractionally lighter. ‘A top-of-the-range model. Typical Benny, nothing but the best when it came to his writing. He seemed happier when he was tapping away. But he was agitated if I came too close.’ She looked back at the still form on the bed. ‘It’s time, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ Probably this evening or during the night. It was already dark again. I went to draw the curtains. I couldn’t resist gazing out at the stars, very clear tonight against a navy sky. I was just a tiny, flawed fragment of dust floating around space. My face felt wet. I realized that tears had been pouring down it for some minutes.

But surrounded by light and possibility, a voice said inside me. Alive. No more half-furnished apartments. No more running from one overseas assignment to another. Time to see what happened if I stayed still.

*

Benny woke again two hours later.

‘Harriet.’ His hand moved across the counterpane and clung to my hand, his grip surprisingly firm. ‘I knew you’d come before… catch the train.’ A real train? I wondered. The one he remembered catching when he came to England with the Jewish children? Or did he mean something metaphorical: a train that would take him on his longest journey?

‘Careful.’ He looked over my shoulder. ‘Don’t let them see you. Both get into trouble.’ He stroked my palm

I pressed his hand. ‘Don’t worry.’ It didn’t feel wrong to stand in for my grandmother, to comfort Benny. ‘They don’t mind.’

‘Even Peter?’

‘Even him,’ I said, on behalf of my long-dead grandfather, who, wherever he was now, could surely not be worrying about an encounter occurring more than half a century ago.

‘Lisa?’

‘Lisa won’t mind.’

*

Anxiety had flooded Lisa’s features when he’d told her he was going back to Fairfleet.

‘Harriet is dead, Benny. Why are you going back there now?’

He’d returned to the country just a day too late for her funeral. Damn that East Coast storm that had blown up from nowhere, grounding planes at JFK.

‘I want to pass on my condolences to her family.’

‘Will they even remember you?’ She shook her head. ‘Oh hark at me, sounding like a jealous wife.’

‘You have nothing to be jealous of. Harriet dying just feels like a part of my youth has gone.’

Lisa nodded. ‘I’m being unreasonable. I just didn’t know that you’d had … those feelings for her.’

Seeing Harriet’s obituary had shocked him into telling his wife about what had happened, almost, between him and his benefactress.

‘But she was a lot older than you.’ Lisa’s eyes had been wide open.

‘Fourteen years. That’s not so much, once you’re out of childhood.’

‘Did Harriet know who you really were?’

‘No. The time never seemed right. You’re the only one who knows, darling.’

And their eyes had met, Benny’s secret almost like their child, the child they’d never had, binding the two of them together.

So he’d gone to Fairfleet. They were building new houses on one of the fields. He’d slipped onto the site so he could peer across the lake at the house. He’d seen Harriet’s daughter sitting on the sunny lawn with the two children. He’d wanted to tell them he was sorry, to let them know just how special Harriet had been. But he felt suddenly shy about intruding.

He should have gone over to them. A failure of courage.

Lisa was standing beside him now.

*

The pressure on my hand softened. Benny slept. Max moved himself from his position at Benny’s feet to lie with his back against his side. A look in the dog’s eyes told me he had no intention of leaving his station. I’d seen dogs behave like this before with the dying, and let Max stay, hoping that some of his presence would be conveyed to my patient, that Benny would know he wasn’t alone.

When Benny stirred, opening his eyes and again staring hard at the wall between the windows on the opposite side of the room, before closing his eyes. A faint smile lit his face.

‘Tired,’ he muttered. ‘Sleep on train.’

‘I think you will too.’ I gave Sarah’s shoulder a gentle shake to rouse her.

He gasped for air. Sarah was standing beside me now.

His breaths became more shallow and rapid, as though his own engine was running short of fuel. ‘Have a safe trip, Rudi.’ I kissed his brow, moving to the window so Sarah could spend a few moments alone with him.

The pause between his breaths lengthened. I returned to him. His face relaxed. When they came, the breaths were very slight. Then there was a longer break. We waited for the next inhalation.

It didn’t arrive.

*

Rudi waved a last
auf Wiedersehen
. No time for protracted farewells; the train was already pulling out of the platform. Carriage after carriage passed him, each filled with waving passengers. He flung open a door and leaped up. The shiny new football fell out of his arm and bounced on the floor. Someone caught it. Benny. Looking as though he’d just come in from an afternoon spent in the sunny park.

‘How’d you get on?’ he asked Rudi. Gone was the swollen neck, the grimy clothes. His friend was grinning at him, bouncing the leather ball on the floor.

‘We won.’ He flopped down beside Benny. ‘Three–nil. I scored one.’

‘Goalkeeper must have been blind.’ But Benny’s voice was warm.

‘Tickets please.’ A man came in wearing a smart uniform Rudi didn’t recognize. Vati. Rudi started to scramble to his feet. But Vati waved him back into his seat. ‘Hello, my son. I hear you played excellently.’ The uniform was plain. No military-looking epaulettes. No Party pins. Non-political. A railway man’s uniform.

The dying, ever-so-rational part of his brain wanted to protest that Vati wasn’t real, that this was all merely neurons misfiring, but the more he stared at his father the more real Vati seemed.

Vati clipped his ticket. ‘We’re running to time. Even with the stop to pick you up.’ He sounded proud, energetic, like the man he’d once been.

‘You knew … I’d be at the station?’

‘Of course I did.’ He gave a little nod and handed back their tickets. ‘I’ve been waiting to take you home on my train for years now, my boy.’ His features relaxed into the smile Rudi remembered from a day years ago when they’d gone for a picnic in fields just outside the town and swum in the lake. ‘Lisa’s in the next carriage, waiting for you.’