Kindergarten (4 page)

the light—a little nursery night-light that Jo had had since he was three.

“Jo!” he called as the news came to an end. “Charlie Brown.”

“Good grief!” came from the sun lounge in a chirpy small American boy’s voice, but the cartoon had been started for some time before he came back into the living-room.

Small American children, serious and absorbed as any children in a Breughel painting, were discussing tactics in a baseball game they were about to play. Jo settled back, his head down at the base of the chesterfield, his feet, higher than his head, resting on top of a newly towelled and dishevelled Baskerville, who accepted his role as footstool with the weary resignation of a Snoopy. Jo laughed frequently, a high breathless chuckle, identical to the way Corrie laughed.

After the programme finished, there would be a five-minute programme for very young children, just before their bedtime, though he and Jo always watched it, usually claiming they were only watching it because Matthias was there. The current series was based on the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. Jo still had a battered Pooh that Mum had made for him. He called it his Linus’s blanket. After this there would be the early evening news, and the picture of the murdered woman would fill the screen again.

Colour television had brought the colour of blood into the living-room. There was no dignity or privacy in death any more. Victims of road accidents or air disasters, murder or terrorism, had photographs of their destroyed bodies in newspapers or on television, to be looked at by strangers.

“We will execute all those who try to approach too near us. We will make no concessions whatsoever.” The name of Rome airport had made Corrie see tall enigmatically smiling figures emerging from shadows, looking down over Mum’s body lying on the blood-stained floor, pointing fingers, a ruinous Last Supper, notebooks filled with mirror writing, diagrams of unborn children in the womb. If they had had a television set nine months ago, perhaps they would have switched it on one evening to watch Piglet going in search of a Heffalump, and seen the body of their murdered mother lying awkwardly amidst broken glass on the marble floor of an airport lounge. She would have been wearing her green coat.

They had been sheltered in Southwold, within that quiet house in the little Suffolk town. The outside world had been far away, beyond the walls which surrounded the school grounds. The television was less than two months old. Things had happened far off, on the rim of a distant world, too far away ever to enter their quietude.

He picked up the two empty mugs and walked through into the kitchen.

Beside the sink was
The Wind in the Willows
calendar that Mum had bought last Christmas. It would be time to take it down soon. Christmas Day was circled, and the twenty-eighth of December, his birthday. He would be sixteen.

The December E. H. Shepard illustration was of the carol-singers outside Mole End. Mole was at the door, holding a candle, looking out at the group of tiny singing field-mice. It was a picture that seemed to him, like Lilli’s illustrations, to carry an acute sense of sadness and melancholy behind it, a feeling of loss, and time passing. Perhaps it was just him, thinking of looking at the same illustration in the book when he was little, and Mum reading it to him. He sometimes felt that he would never feel as old again as he now felt, watching small children at play. He had a copy of
The Wind in the Willows
and other children’s books near his bed, as carefully hidden as if they were pornography.

Above the illustration was the description of the carolsingers from the novel:
In the fore-court, lit by the dim rays of a horn lantern, some eight or ten little field-mice stood in a semi-circle, red worsted comforters round their throats, their fore-paws thrust deep into their pockets, their feet jigging for warmth. With bright beady eyes they glanced shyly at each other, sniggering a little, sniffing and applying coat-sleeves a good deal.

He ran the hot water into the mugs, wiping round the inside with the cloth. He remembered a phrase from a little further on in the novel, just before the words of the carol: “shrill little voices.” He could still hear the rain beating against the glass roof of the sun lounge.

London
, N16

30th March 1938

Dear Mr. High,

Miss Greif told me that you will accept my boy Walter who has been at school in Berlin in your school at once at the much reduced fee of £55. I do not know how to thank you for your kindness. As I was well-off until only a short time ago it was hard for me to ask you to moderate the school fees. Miss Greif will have told you that I was a musician in Germany, and as I am Jewish I have lost every means of earning a livelihood there. I have been here in England trying to begin a new existence. My wife and two daughters are still in Germany waiting for the time when I shall be able to support them here, and they can join me and be safe. I hope this time comes soon. Mrs. Werth, Dr. phil., was a lecturer and has now no more right to teach in Germany.

My son will arrive in London this week. I have not seen him for a year; and would like to have him with me for two days, if you will allow me. Please do not send my bill to my wife in Berlin, because of the special circumstances in Germany. She cannot write to you from Berlin such as she wants to.

With great thankfulness,
Leon Werth

He heard the high urgent signature tune of the news beginning in the living-room, and then the television was switched off, and all the living-room lights.

Jo came into the kitchen, and walked through into the sun lounge.

“Hello,” he said to Cyril, the umbrella plant on the desk. “It is I, Johann. Are you pleased to see me?”

He began to slide on the tiles, using his stockinged feet.

“Ready for the carol service, Jo? Warble, child; make passionate my sense of hearing.”

Jo immediately assumed a coy expression, folded his hands in front of him, and began to sing in a very high-pitched voice.

“Once in royal David’s city
            Stood a lowly cattle shed,
Where a mother laid her baby
            In a manger for his bed:
Mary was that mother mild,
Jesus Christ her little child.”

“You’re not singing that!”

Jo shook his head. “No. And not like that either.”

He sat on the floor and began to put his shoes on.

“Do you know you’re going mouldy, Corrie? I’ve tactfully refrained from mentioning it so far, knowing how sensitive you are about your appearance. One doesn’t wish to cause embarrassment.”

Corrie rubbed his hand across his face, and looked at the powdery green streaks from Matthias’s poster paint.

“Just thought I’d mention it,” Jo said.

“We were always singing that carol in junior school,” Corrie said. “‘Away in a Manager,’ ‘We Three Kings,’ ‘While Shepherds Watched.’ Do you remember hymnsinging in junior school?”

“‘Daisies Are Our Silver,’ ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful,’ ‘Little Drops of Water.’ ‘Please, miss, he had his eyes open during the prayer.’ Mrs. Bradbury could never grasp the fact that if someone saw you with your eyes open, he must have had his eyes open as well.”

“I remember you shoving your head up where the glove compartment used to be in that abandoned car, and pretending to be the radio.”

“Hi there, all you listeners in wonderful radio-land.”

“You never liked the Romans in Miss Pinion’s history lessons, because they all went to the lavatory together.”

“Filthy beasts!”

Jo was wandering restlessly about the sun lounge, touching at the window-frames.

“I wish I’d seen that nativity play with Matty.”

“Just thinking about it makes me laugh.”

During the previous week, Matthias had spoken of nothing but the nativity play which his play school had been taken to see at a local junior school, a special performance for an audience of mothers and grandparents. He had told them all about it. There was the Gold king, and the two other kings were called Frankenstein and Mirth. Frankenstein wouldn’t kneel down, and Joseph’s beard came off, and he dropped baby Jesus off the end of the stage. He bounced two feet into the air, and Guy Richens’s grandmother laughed so much that she fell backwards off a bench, and everyone saw her knickers. Jo had enjoyed hearing that bit.

There was a pause.

Jo moved across towards Corrie, and sat down on the floor near Baskerville, scratching his head. He looked up at Corrie, his face serious.

“I wish Dad could be here with us for Christmas.”

“He explained to us all about that, Jo, when he phoned. He explained all over again.”

“For Mum,” Jo whispered, as though speaking an incantation.

“For Mum.”

Four American children, members of a school group touring Europe, had also been amongst those killed at Rome airport. Their parents, together with others who had been bereaved, had formed the Sharon Schlechte Foundation, an organisation to aid victims of terrorism. Dad had flown to the United States a week ago, to help organise a fund-raising drive.

He had booked a phone call to them earlier that afternoon.

(“Daddy!” Jo said, clutching the phone. It was a bad, congested line, like a dial being turned on an old-fashioned radio—the names of remote and unknown cities from outdated maps with pre-war boundaries—fragments of foreign phrases, the conversations of strangers, their father’s voice half-drowned by the echoing voices calling out into the crowded air.

“Daddy!” Jo shouted out, trying to be heard across the gulf, all the voices in between.

“Everyone is so hospitable and kind, but I’m lonely here without you. I’m here because of Mum. What I’m trying to do is for Mum. If I could be with you, I would be. Christmas is a time for families.”)

“Remember Lilli telling us that in Germany Christmas Eve is a time when the close family are alone together?” Jo spoke quietly, his head turned aside, as if he were whispering to Baskerville.

“Think of those children in Berlin.”

I
N
THE
silence that followed, all the lights suddenly went out. The kitchen clock began to chime six o’clock, and then, on the other side of the house, the school clock above the main building began to chime, the deep notes resounding across the Green. They were enclosed in a faintly gleaming glass box, watery shadows streaming down, as if they were below the surface, of deep water, drawn down by the Nixie of the Mill-Pond.

On Lilli’s side of the sun lounge there was a faint subdued glow, splintered by the frosted glass of the connecting door. As they watched, Jo still sitting on the floor, the glow grew in intensity, and swaying liquescent light came nearer. The door opened, and Lilli stood in the doorway, holding a candlestick in each hand. Illuminated by the soft, flickering light, her face intent, she was like a figure in a Gerrit van Honthorst nativity scene. Her hair was drawn back from her face, and she was wearing a simple floor-length dress.

Looking straight ahead of her, she began to make a formal little speech, her face impassive.

“A German Christmas is a very special time. Watch Night,
Weihnachten
, is associated with magical revelations. Mountains open and reveal their hoards of precious stones, church bells ring out from cities at the bottom of the sea, trees burst into blossom and fruit, the sun jumps thrice for joy, and the pure in heart can understand the language of animals.”

She paused, and then raised her voice, calling out loudly, “Magical revelations!”

From an inner room in Lilli’s house, a handbell began to ring, a high silvery sound.

“Come,” Lilli said, standing aside from the door, smiling, beckoning them towards her, giving each of them a candlestick, placing her arms around their shoulders. “Come inside.”

T
HEY
followed Lilli through the darkened living-room, where Matthias was standing, immensely excited, ringing a little silver bell, and all of them moved slowly into the unlit hallway at the foot of the stairs, to wait outside the dining-room. The candles swayed in the cool currents of air, and, as they stood there, they could see the shape of the dining-room door outlined in a rippling light that shone through the gaps betouen the door and the frame from inside.

“This is the special room that no one has been allowed into,” Lilli said. “Why did the bell ring?”

“Father Christmas has just gone!” Matthias shouted, very shrill, the bell ringing erratically as he jumped up and down.

“And what has he left for us in this room?”

The words were like a catechism.

“Christmas presents, and the tree, the tree!”

Matthias was in an ecstasy of expectancy.

“Open the door, Matty.”

Lilli gave a small conspiratorial smile to Corrie and Jo as Matthias put his hand on the doorknob, hesitated rather nervously, looked round to see that they were still with him, and then pushed it hard so that it swung completely open.

There was a squeal from Matthias.

The whole room was green and silver, lit only by the glow of scores of candles. The tree was the sole decoration, dominating the room, up to the height of the ceiling in the corner near the window, glittering with strands of silver hanging down from every branch, and for a moment—with the current of air gusting in as the door opened, and the heat and glow as they entered, the birthday-cake smell of burning candles—the whole tree, and the room, seemed to sway away and then back towards them as the shadows shifted. Candles covered the tree and rimmed the dining-table; and Lilli’s glazed paintings, lining the walls, reflected back and multiplied the images of hundreds of candle flames, hovering in the air about them like bright fluttering wings. From the glass of every painting, from the polished wooden frames, from every reflective surface in the room—the face of the clock, the glasses and cutlery on the table, the metallic paper around the presents on the low tables in the bay of the window—light danced and pulsated, as if they were in a small and brilliantly lit church. Outside, in the cold and wet of the winter evening, the coloured bulbs on the bare branches of the horse-chestnut tree in the middle of Dunwich Green looked wan and distant, pale beyond the reflected glow in the dark glass of the window.