The One I Was (6 page)

‘Thank you. I’ll just clear this.’ I took the sorbet bowl and carried it out on the tray, leaving it on the small table outside the door for Sarah to collect. She’d told me he hated having used plates and cutlery left in his room.

‘I’ve been working on that laptop too long. My eyes feel tired. Or perhaps it’s the patch.’ He stopped. I sensed there was more to say.

‘Is the patch keeping you comfortable?’

‘Yes. The doctor explained … that it wouldn’t be enough to take me … through. I’ll probably need a syringe pump soon, he said.’

And once that arrived Benny would spend more time sleeping.

‘Would you read to me? It’s
Great Expectations
.’ The book was on the bedside table, underneath the open laptop. As I moved the laptop Benny made an anxious sound.

‘Don't worry,’ I said. ‘I won’t drop it.’

He didn’t say anything. I wondered if he’d been concerned I’d read what was on the screen. I wouldn’t have dreamed of looking at the words, but in any case the laptop had already gone into sleep mode.

I found a page in the book marked with a used envelope.

‘Pip’s just arrived in London.’ There was a note of challenge in Benny’s voice. ‘He’s the new boy, the kid from out of town, and he needs to learn the new way of doing things. And quickly.’

Like Benny himself had had to, I thought, when he’d come here just before the war. Or like I was having to, now.

‘Is it a novel you know well?’

‘I’ve read it a few times. I like it for its apparent simplicity. Fewer characters to keep in your mind than in most of Dickens’ novels. But the simplicity is deceptive.’

‘It usually is.’ I’d spoken without thinking. He gave me a searching look. I began to read, moving my eyes from the page to his face from time to time, to check I wasn’t reading too fast or slowly, or with too much or little expression. Benny’s eyes stayed on the wall opposite his bed, as if the text were written on its cream surface. I read on.

‘Magwitch,’ he muttered. ‘What a terrifying apparition for a young boy.’

I agreed, though we hadn’t been reading about Magwitch in this chapter. And tonight I didn’t want to let that frightening outcast, who’d returned after so many years’ absence, into my mind.

‘Your one worst nightmare, waiting to reappear,’ Benny went on. ‘But Pip doesn’t know that yet.’

My mouth felt as dry as the pages in the book. Had Benny guessed what had happened in Oxford? Impossible. I was being fanciful, not the calm, professional nurse who ought to have cleared her mind of the incident before coming to her patient’s bedside.

‘Nor do we readers,’ I said. ‘If we do, it’s only because we’ve read the book before and know how the story goes.’

‘We know how the story goes,’ he repeated softly.

After a while his breathing grew slower and his breaths longer. I replaced the envelope in the book, noticing in passing that it was addressed to Benny and had a modern-looking German stamp on it. Benny looked peaceful now.

I rose and busied myself tidying the very few things in the room that Sarah hadn’t already tidied. When I looked at him again he was sleeping, breathing peacefully. I wondered whether he dreamed and if so, of what. He’d had a long and full life. Did his mind return to the triumphs? Or did he drift back to his early childhood, as so many people did at the end of their lives?

I went down to Sarah, leaving Benny alone with the dog.

‘Sleeping, is he?’ She lifted her head from a recipe book. ‘He’s had a better day. Perhaps you’re doing him good already, Rosamond.’

‘It’s probably the patch, but I hope I can help make him feel at peace and cared for.’ I sat down at the table and watched her as she gathered ingredients together. ‘But you’ve certainly looked after him very well.’

‘Sometimes he has such terrible dreams. Could it be the drugs?’

‘Might be. We’ll talk to the doctor. There may be antipsychotics or sedatives that will help with that.’

‘Good luck getting him to agree to taking those. But he’s scared of something.’ She took an egg out of a carton and cracked it on the side of a Pyrex bowl. ‘I think it’s to do with all that happened just before he came to England. He left Germany a month or so after Kristallnacht. They smashed Jewish shop windows in his town. And some of the houses were targeted too, he told me.’

‘It must have been a relief to be safe.’ But I wondered what had happened to Benny’s family, whether he’d felt homesick, alone, lost, in his new home. He must have done.

‘The Dorners took good care of the boys they took in. That’s probably why Benny bought this house, because of the happy memories. But it can’t have been easy for him. He even changed his name eventually, to make himself seem more English and less German–Jewish.’

I didn’t know this. ‘What was he called originally?’

‘Benjamin Goldman. He became Benny Gault as the years went by. Sounded more English, he told me.’

Names were important: I knew that, hypocrite that I was, coming back here with a name which, while legally mine, obscured so much.

‘Benny always wanted to belong.’ Sarah broke the shell and expertly held the yolk back, allowing the white to flop into the Pyrex bowl. ‘There have been Kindertransport reunions over the years, but he never attends. Always sends large cheques for memorials. And to other refugee organizations, though I probably shouldn’t tell you that.’ She tipped the yolk into a tea cup. ‘But apart from the boys he grew up with here, he keeps himself apart from his past. And three of the old Dorner boys are overseas. Of the two others still in Britain, one’s a carer for his sick wife and the other lives in Edinburgh. They ring and email, but they can’t easily visit. Shame because they’re the ones who really understand the early trouble.’

Benny and I had both known early trouble. And we’d both found ways of insulating ourselves from discomforting echoes: he in this old country house with its sweeping views and fine furniture; me in my minimalist flat with its few starkly fashionable pieces.

‘I’ll get my book,’ I said, rising from the chair.

But my book wasn’t on my mind. I was thinking of that missing letter my mother had written years ago.

*

Next morning, after I’d helped Benny wash and given him his medication, he said he wanted to sit up in his armchair and do his crossword. ‘Please put the laptop on the dressing table, I’ll want to write later.’ He looked distracted this morning, mind already on the words he wanted to tap out. I didn’t know whether he would welcome any interest in the writing. Half of me thought a journalist would like people talking about his work, relish the interest, in fact. But the other half detected a desire in Benny to be left to whatever he was writing, without questions.

He had clothes to be washed. Sarah had already told me that the utility room was down in the basement. A chance for me to descend the stone steps. My pulse beat fast and my mouth felt chalky-dry. But when I reached the ground floor, holding the laundry basket, Sarah herself was unlocking the basement door.

‘I’m on my way to see if the towels have finished in the dryer.’ She held out her arms for the basket. ‘I’ll take those down for you, Rosamond.’

I made an attempt to protest, but she was having none of it. ‘If Benny’s doing his crossword he’ll be quite happy for an hour.’ She nodded at the window by the front door. ‘The sun’s come out. Go for a walk, Rosamond.’

I started to demur, even as relief flooded me.

‘I need eggs,’ she said. ‘They sell them in the village shop. You’d be doing me a favour if you walked down there for me. Perhaps take Max with you?’

I’d forgotten about the shop when I’d decided to come back to Fairfleet. We hadn’t visited it that often when I’d lived here before, so long ago. Just at the very end.

The shop had been given a make-over. The vivid tangerine-and-yellow Battenberg cakes and fondant fancies had gone, replaced with organic tea loaves, arranged in lined baskets. Instead of Black Tower and Blue Nun, bottles of Pinot Grigio and Chilean Sauvignon stood on stripped wooden shelves.

A middle-aged woman was serving customers behind the till and an older woman sat on a chair in the corner reading an
Express
, a walking stick propped up against the shelves of washing powder beside her. Mother and daughter, I concluded.

I took the eggs to the counter. The woman lifted her head. I recognized her. My heart thumped as I bent my head over my purse, as though searching for the correct change. The
tap, step, tap, step
of the old woman coming towards the till made me look up. She watched me silently.

‘I’ll put the kettle on in a moment, Mum,’ the shopkeeper said, taking my coins.

I felt both sets of eyes on me as I left the shop after a hastily muttered thank-you. I untied Max from the hook outside the door and we walked briskly back up the lane to Fairfleet. Had that woman recognized me? No way of telling.

I was looking forward to returning to Benny’s room. As a young woman I would never have dreamed that my career would have been spent in sickrooms. But my job suited me and I suited my job.

As Sarah had predicted Benny was still working on his crossword when I returned to him. ‘With you in a moment, just let me finish this clue.’ He sounded brisk. Perhaps my reappearance had reminded him of his decline.

‘I can still just about do these things,’ he said with satisfaction, putting down his pen.

‘Cryptic crosswords baffle me.’

‘You need someone to teach you the tricks. I had a very good tutor during the war. So good I’m surprised he wasn’t bundled off to Bletchley Park to break ciphers.’

I’d always wondered why the boys hadn’t been sent to school. Seeming to read my thoughts, Benny went on, ‘Lord Dorner, my benefactor, was worried about anti-Semitism in English schools.’

‘Ironic.’

‘There was a lot of anxiety about foreign Jews flooding the professions. We were supposed to go into manual work when we grew up.’

‘No wonder he thought it was easier to educate you privately.’ Hard to imagine a parallel existence for Benny Gault as a miner or farm labourer.

‘And Lady Dorner?’ I stooped to pick up a throw that had fallen onto the carpet and folded it carefully on the end of the bed. ‘Was she welcoming?’

‘She flew for the auxiliary air transport so she was away for a lot of the time.’

I tried to reflect both interest and surprise in my expression, thinking back to James’s warnings. ‘You’ll find it a strain,’ he had said. ‘When they tell you things you already know and you have to pretend you’re hearing them for the first time.’

‘Just because you teach drama doesn’t mean you have to treat this whole assignment as though I’m going on stage.’

‘Oh but you will be on stage, Rosamond,’ he’d told me.

Benny was staring out of the window, caught up in the past. ‘Harriet Dorner was quite a woman,’ he said softly. ‘One of a kind.’

I know
, I said silently.

‘Tell me about her.’ I sat back in my armchair.

‘She was tall and athletic. Very pretty. Younger than her husband. He adored her. He indulged her in her flying lessons before the war. Probably never dreamed she’d end up doing the things she did. She flew planes from one airfield to another so that they were in the right
position for the RAF. Dangerous work. Those women weren’t armed. Often they lacked basic navigational tools, as well.’

I remembered hearing about a flight across the Highlands in thick cloud, the terror that a hidden mountain top would suddenly appear.

‘She was away for long periods,’ Benny went on. ‘But she’d sometimes come home for weekends or an occasional week. She’d be walking around the gardens when I was playing football outside.’ He grinned, his gaunt features losing decades. ‘I remember her telling me off for hitting a peony with the ball. Must have been the first spring of the war, May 1940. The Germans had invaded the Low Countries. Everyone was on edge.’

9

The space between the lilac tree and the peony was almost exactly the width of a goal, Benny estimated. Situated right at the far end of the lawn, there was a good run-up, too. The others were busy playing with the train set, but now the rain had stopped, Benny needed to be outside.

He took aim. The first kick was a good one, but the ball flew three feet to the left of the lilac. He ran after it, the damp grass squelching under his plimsolls. Really he needed proper boots, like the ones he’d left at home.

The second kick was still wide. Again he ran after the ball, plucking it out of the bushes. The third shot hit the tree, sending out the aroma of lilac. Fleetingly Benny’s mother was there in the garden too. He remembered her cutting sprigs of lilac blossom to bring inside.

When he aimed the ball again it was a disaster. A spray of dark red petals dropped onto the lawn.

‘Boy!’ The voice was a commanding one. He turned round to see Lady Dorner in a mackintosh, eyes blazing. ‘That’s my peony you’re destroying.’

‘I’m sorry.’ And he was. He’d never imagined she could look as furious as this. What could he do? She glared at him as she strode towards him.

‘That is a very beautiful plant that flowers for about a fortnight once a year. You have destroyed at least three of the blossoms, Benny.’

He felt his cheeks warm.

‘Can’t you use one of the oaks? God knows, they’re sturdy enough.’

‘Yes. Sorry, Lady Dorner.’ He gazed at his plimsolls.

‘What were you trying to do? Blast it to death?’

‘To make my football kick more … sharp.’ He was speaking in English, almost without thinking about it – not perfectly, he knew, but well enough. Perhaps she appreciated this too. The glare softened.

‘I was just taking a stroll or else I wouldn’t have known what you were up to.’

‘I was not knowing you were at home, Lady Dorner.’ The wrong thing to say. Made it sound as though he was only sorry he’d been caught, not about damaging the shrub.

‘They gave me a few days off. God knows why at a time like this.’ She nodded at the ball, still lying beside the scattered red petals. ‘You’re very determined, Benny.’

He shuffled.

‘Do the others play football?’