Losing Nicola (19 page)

‘Plus the darned crystals she had hanging from every available space so that every time I moved I risked losing an eye. And nothing in the icebox but tofu and bean-shoots. I had to sneak out for a McDonald's just to keep body and soul together. To be frank, she left for India only seconds before I kicked her out.'

‘Why did you take up with her in the first place?' I am laughing, remembering what a good companion he was. Still is. ‘You must have known she wasn't the right woman for you.'

‘I've made that mistake before.'

I ignore this. ‘Is there anyone else in your life at the moment?'

‘I've dated this woman from the English Department a couple of times.'

‘What's she like?'

‘She's okay.' He waves a hand disparagingly in the air. ‘That's unfair. She's actually very nice.
Very
nice.'

‘Maybe it'll be third time lucky.'

‘Actually, I thought it was first time lucky,' he says lugubriously.

In the face of this unsubtle appeal for sympathy, I smile. After a while, his face assumes its customary cheerfulness. ‘So . . . what should I see in this windy old town?'

We do the tour. The North End with its picturesque knobby-kneed cottages, the fourteenth-century castle built in the shape of a Tudor rose, the other rose-shaped castle which is full of memorabilia of Waterloo and Queen Victoria. We end up walking along the pier to look back at the pastel-coloured houses lining the long Esplanade.

Eventually, we stroll back to my apartment. My home. The wind off the sea is warm; it strokes my hair like a caress. Waves shift restlessly in to shore, seagulls dive and quarrel.

I brew him some coffee and we sit on the window-seat, looking out at the sea. ‘It's nice here, but I can't see you staying long term,' Allen says.

‘Why not?'

‘What's there here for you? Cute, I'll grant you, but not much else. Or is it the desire to get back to your roots?'

‘Could be.' For a moment I contemplate telling him about Nicola. But the subject is too overwhelming to be casually
dropped into the conversation. ‘Actually,' I say, ‘I think I'll enjoy it.' I turn the conversation to mutual friends. ‘By the way, how are the Staceys getting along?'

‘Fine, Tom's got a sabbatical coming up and is thinking of spending it, of all places, in Santiago. And Nancy Landauer specially asked me to say hi . . .'

For the rest of the afternoon we hash over memories, do-you-remembers?

Later, we walk back to the station. Before he gets onto the train he hugs me and I feel the treacherous tug of comfort and familiarity. ‘If you ever stop enjoying, call me,' he says. ‘I'll be happy to come pick up the pieces.'

‘I'll do that, Allen. I mean it.'

I wave him off, a small lump in my throat. I wonder how long it'll be before we meet again.

A
llen's visit has triggered memories which have nothing to do with Nicola. For me, this flat is haunted by Sasha Elias. His music is here, his piano, his diary. I want to know more about him. I want to find him again.

From the pile of his papers I have retrieved from the stool, I pick another sheet at random.

Mrs Sheffield came to my door this morning with a visitor. A strong-faced woman from along the road, who wishes me to give her daughter piano-lessons. Mrs Fiona Beecham. She is very uncombed, but obviously of a good class. ‘I do feel that all children should at least be exposed to music when they are young,' she says. ‘My sisters and I were all taught to play an instrument from an early age. In my case, it was the viola.'

‘Ah yes.'

‘The trouble is,' she said, ‘that my daughter is in danger of turning into a little savage.'

‘A savage?'

‘A wild thing. She's what we call a tomboy . . . there are so many boys around all the time, d'you see?'

‘I . . . think so,' I said. Perhaps she is making an English joke. I cannot imagine that Mutti would refer to my sisters as little savages.

‘Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast,' she said – at least, so I believe that she said. ‘So if you can fit Alice – my daughter, that is – into your timetable, it would be a very good thing. I was hoping for lessons at least twice a week until she goes back to school.'

‘I'm sure that I can find a place for her.'

‘That's very good.' She asked me for my terms and seemed to find them acceptable. ‘So when could she start? As soon as possible would be best.'

‘Not tomorrow,' I said. ‘But the next day. And then again at the end of the week.'

‘Excellent.'

She rested the back of her hand against the delicate skin of her temples. It was a strange gesture. It did not seem as though she had a headache, rather (or so I took it to be) it implied an inability to absorb anything more into a brain already overloaded with information. Her eyelids were very red, as though she had been weeping for hours. Mrs Beecham is not a pretty woman, but certainly she is what they call handsome. She gives me the impression always that she should be somewhere else, doing something different. Teaching in a university lecture hall, perhaps, or playing some instrument such as a harp, in a long green dress, a velvet band across her forehead. Sometimes I see her gaze rest upon her children and a look of confusion passes across her face.
Where did they all come from?
she seems always to be saying.
Why am I here, when I should be altogether elsewhere?

I rest the pages on my knee. Sasha has caught my mother precisely. I remember so well that baffled expression on her face as she looked round at the breakfast table, the back of the wrist laid against her forehead, her red eyelids.

She said, ‘Why don't you come to our house this afternoon, have a cup of tea with us? Then you can meet your new pupil.' When she is gone, I speak in her voice, knowing that this is the way I must talk if I am to be accepted, if I am to be English, as Cousin Dieter wishes me to be.

‘My sisters and I were all taught to play music at an early age. . . .' I say it over and over again, ‘My sisters and I . . .' and then I am weeping, thinking of my own two little sisters who died God knows what ugly deaths.

Therefore, this afternoon I have called at the house of Mrs Beecham. It is ten houses away from here and has its name – Glenfield – on the gatepost
.
I knocked on the door with my knuckle because there was no doorbell or knocker, and Mrs Fiona Beecham, let me in. ‘Ah, Mr Elias,' she said in her good English voice. ‘Do come in.'

She took me into a big room, where steps of cast iron lead down into the small front garden. There were German books on the shelves in this household and my eyes lit up. So the book-burning ceremonies I had imagined taking place across the length and the breadth of England did not happen after all.

Mrs Beecham saw what I was looking at. ‘Oh, do borrow them, Mr Elias,' she said in a voice that was kind. ‘In fact, please take them all home with you to Mrs Sheffield's. I don't read German and neither do my children, and I'm quite sure my husband wouldn't mind.'

Home . . . I must remember that I am English now. Instead of the big comfortable flat on Lindenstrasse, with its long windows overlooking the garden, this cold room with the worn Turkish carpet on the floor is my home. Outside the window there is a cherry tree here, just as we were having in München. Munich, I must call it now.

‘My husband was a Lektor in Tübingen before the war,' Mrs Beecham told me, ‘He speaks fluent German, he was in Army Intelligence during and after it, because of his facility with the language.'

She opened her eyes wide, willing me not to make the connection between conquered and conqueror – perhaps she doesn't know that I am Jewish.

I would like to tell her about my sisters. About Pappi and Mutti, all surely dead by now.

When darkness had fallen and I finally dared to leave the wardrobe where I'd been hidden, I found my mother's pearls scattered on the floor. I took time to snatch up a handful of them before walking out into the deserted street.

The screams of Anna and Magdalena were in my ears. Oh my sisters, poor little gentle girls. I cannot allow myself to think beyond the threshold of our house in Lindenstrasse, although I imagine all too clearly what happened.

The German books of Mrs Beecham are old-fashioned and worn. There are scrawls over some of the pages and I imagine my new pupil as a younger child, taking a yellow wax crayon or a blue one in her fat little hands and scribbling over the paper.

Twenty years have gone by since he wrote them, and the world has changed, but his words are still as painful to read, as they must have been for him to write. I want to know if he ever found his family again. Above all, I want to know why he didn't come looking for me in Paris.

A single star gleams above the horizon, which is streaked with the fiery reds of a summer sunset. Twenty-one miles away, French cliffs squat on the edge of the sea. Nearer to hand, something is caught among the intricate carvings of the marble fireplace surround, gleaming dully. It takes me a moment to recognize this as a pearl, and then to realize that this is
my
pearl, the one I hid there twenty years ago. It seems extraordinary that it should still be there. I prise it out and rest it on my palm. It seems to have meaning of some kind, though I know it cannot have; it is just part of a random pattern of events which are only loosely related one to the other.

I take up another sheet of Sasha Elias's writing.

When this child, this Alice, comes to me for her first piano lesson, I see my sisters again and for a while I can forget my thoughts. For a while the loneliness goes. Although I do not say so, because I need the money, in truth I would happily give her piano lessons for nothing. She has dirty finger-nails and a grubby dress. Sometimes she smells a little unwashed. She looks as though nobody cares for her. I want to bath her, wash her hair, soap her thin shoulders, the way I did with my sisters. Her hands are beautiful, but very small. I doubt if she could ever be a good pianist because she will not be able to play octaves very easily. My other pupil is much more gifted, Mary Arbuthnot. I can see her becoming very good indeed. She also plays the flute very beautifully, as well as the piano, and is competent on the 'cello although she is still too young and small to get the full range out of it.

I would pay to teach Alice, if only to have, for two half hours a week, someone to speak to. To look into her soft brown eyes and see the shy dimple in her round cheeks. To hold her on my knee the way I held my sisters, Anna and Magdalena. I cannot even think of them because if I do, I will fall into an ocean of despair and will never again find the shore. I am tortured by the fact that I am alive and they are dead. If I had stayed with my family, could I have saved them? I know that of course I could not. I would be dead too. I wish I were.

Instead I sit in this big room and look out at the sea, at the masts of wrecked ships rising on the horizon, where, my landlady tells me, there are some treacherous sands, and that on New Year's Day a cricket match is played there. Only the English, I think, as I smile politely and drink the tea she has prepared for me in her chilly basement kitchen, would think of playing cricket on a quicksand in the middle of winter. ‘Every year there are wrecks,' she says. ‘Casualties.' She gestures in the direction of the red, white and blue lifeboat that sits high up on the shingle to the left of my window. ‘You can hear the maroons go off to call the lifeboat men together. Such brave men . . .'

I think of the sailors screaming for their mothers as the cold water fills their mouths; my father told me that this is how most men die in battle, calling for their mothers.

‘Orlando, it's me. Or should I say it is I?'

‘Me, I, it doesn't matter. Either way I recognize your voice.' I can hear him smiling.

‘You remember Sasha Elias, who taught me piano that last summer holidays we were here?'

‘I know who you're talking about, if that's what you mean.'

‘How would I find him, supposing I wanted to?'

‘I haven't a clue. He taught music at that prep school in the country, didn't he?'

‘Braybrook Park, yes.'

‘Perhaps he's still in the area.'

‘I don't think so. I ran into him in Paris, years ago,' I say. ‘So he must have left here. He said he was studying composition with some famous teacher.'

‘Fiona might know.'

‘The name doesn't ring any recent bells with you, does it? I mean, you're both musicians.'

‘Sasha Elias . . . I don't think so. Tell you what, why don't you get in touch with Vi Sheffield.'

‘Who's she?'

‘You know, Mrs Sheffield, used to own the house you're living in.'

‘
Vi
? Since when did you start calling her Vi?'

He considers. ‘About twenty-five years ago. I used to play chess with her.'

‘Why didn't you tell me?'

‘I'm sure I did.'

‘I'm sure I would have remembered.' He was always going off to have tea with what at the time I had considered elderly ladies. He had a way of smiling at them which made them smile back, which perhaps helped them to forget their anxieties for a while. And I'm sure they found his wiseacre manner extremely droll.

I put in a call to Braybrook Park, and am received with total incomprehension. The school has changed hands three times in the past twenty years, their records are not complete, nobody who is on the staff now was on the staff back then. After consultation with someone else in the office, I am given the name of a cousin of a current member of staff whose father-in-law might have been teaching games at the time. I write down the flimsy details I am given, though they are clearly nothing more than a dead end.