Postcards From No Man's Land (17 page)

While Daan approached his grandmother to say his hellos, Jacob observed from the door, hesitating between
out and in. Geertrui’s white-haired head was propped up on a bank of white pillows in a white iron-frame bed shrouded (the only right word) with white coverings. The walls of the room were pink. On a white bedside cabinet, a still-life of colour: an earthenware bowl of oranges, apples, pears, bananas; a blue glass vase brimming with red roses; a bronze-framed triptych of photographs displaying pictures of two men and a woman. The woman Jacob recognised was Mrs van Riet, Daan’s mother, younger than now. One of the men was Daan. The other man he didn’t know. Not a hint of medical gear, no sign of sickness. But he guessed this was deliberate. Like a living room tidied up for a visitor. In the air, though, he sensed tension, an uneasy silence.

She’s like a moth, Jacob thought, who has settled for the winter, prepared for hibernation. But her large sunken eyes were alert, and took him in, peering from either side of Daan’s head as he stooped to give his grandmother, slowly, delicately, a three-barrelled kiss.

Mrs van Riet was sitting in the only arm chair at one side of the bed. She got up and came to Jacob.

‘I’m sorry about the trouble you had,’ she said in subdued tones. ‘Are you comfortable at Daan’s?’

‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks.’

‘Tomorrow I’ll take you to the ceremony at Oosterbeek. I’ll come for you at nine fifteen. Please be ready, we mustn’t miss the train. We’ll talk then.’

‘Nine fifteen. Right.’

‘Now I’ll go and have coffee while you visit Mother. She insists it must be alone.’

Mrs van Riet went, leaving her unhappiness behind like a vapour trail.

Daan was standing by Geertrui’s bed, waiting for Jacob to be ready. Geertrui lay unmoving, her eyes, a washed-out blue, fixed on him.

‘Geertrui,’ Daan said, ‘
dit is
Jacob.’

When he did not move, because he could not, Geertrui,
smiling, said, ‘Please. Come.’

Daan placed a chair where Jacob could be seen by Geertrui without her having to lift her head.

The expression ‘walking on eggs’ made sense to him for the first time as Jacob crossed the room and perched on the edge of the chair. It was the intensity of Geertrui’s scrutiny that unnerved him. This was not a woman you would wrangle with. Necessary to sit with a straight back. Yet there was hardly anything of her. So little sign of a body under the cover that she seemed like a disembodied head and a pair of arms lying on the counterpane that ended in fine small hands, almost a girl’s except that they were mottled with the brown spots of old age.

‘Hello, Mrs Wesseling,’ Jacob said. ‘Sarah sends you her greetings. She also sent a gift and a letter, but they’re in my things at … Well, I expect you know.’

‘I’ve explained,’ Daan said. ‘I’ll leave you together. I’ll just be along the corridor. Geertrui says she’ll send you to me when it’s time for us to leave. Okay?’

Jacob nodded. Daan gave him a look that meant ‘Don’t stay long.’ Then spoke to his grandmother in Dutch and kissed her again. There was a tone in his voice Jacob had not heard before. Very soft, tender, precise. Like a lover to the beloved.

All the while Geertrui did not take her eyes off Jacob. Daan went, closing the door quietly behind him. There was a long silence before she spoke.

‘You have your grandfather’s eyes.’

Jacob smiled. ‘That’s what my grandmother says.’

‘And his smile.’

‘That too.’

‘His … nature?’

‘Some. Apparently, I’m not as practical as he was. With his hands, I mean. With tools. He liked making things.’

‘I know.’

‘Furniture, even. Sarah still uses some of it. And
gardening, he loved gardening, whereas I hate it. He was a big reader, and we share that. But I’m not as brave as he was, I’m sure.’

‘Have you had cause?’

‘To be brave? Does bravery need a cause?’

‘There can be none without.’

For the first time since he entered the room her eyes left him. He could still not take his from her. But without her eyes on him he could relax enough to ease back in his seat.

After a silence Geertrui said, ‘You live with your grandmother?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not with your parents.’

‘No.’

He waited, knowing she wanted him to explain, but pretending innocence. Would she wheedle or come at it direct? A game he played with Sarah.

‘Are you going to tell me why?’

Direct. Not a woman for pastime games. Not now anyway, with so little time left to pass.

‘If you’d like me to.’

‘Yes.’

He knew this mood also. Tell me a story, entertain me. Was that his job today, his reason for being here? Young children like to be told stories to help them go to sleep. Maybe old people like being told stories to help them die. Well, he thought, if that’s why I’m here, I don’t mind. As good a job as any. And a lot easier than conversation. Begin at the beginning, the King said, gravely, and go on till you come to the end.

‘You know I have an older sister, Penelope, and a younger brother, Harry? Penny—our father calls her Poppy—is three years older. Harry is eighteen months younger, so he’s fifteen and a half. My father dotes on Penny. Well actually, they dote on each other. I mean, just about verging on the obscene, in my opinion.’ He laughed,
but there was no reaction. ‘I know Freud is supposed to have said that sons are in love with their mothers and want to kill their fathers, but in our house, it’s not like that at all. The problem is father loving daughter and vice versa. At least they don’t want to kill Mum.’ Still no reponse. ‘By the way, the mother-son thing is called the Oedipus complex, isn’t it. I wonder if the father-daughter affair has a name as well?’

‘Electra,’ said the head from the bed.

‘Electra?’

‘Electra complex. Daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. You don’t know?’

‘No.’

‘Electra convinced her brother Orestes to avenge their father’s murder by their mother’s lover Aegisthus. Go on with your story.’

‘Okay. Thanks. Well, Penny’s an assistant manager in a chain-store boutique. We don’t get on at all. I think she’s a fashion-crazed zombie and she thinks I’m a boring and pretentious snob. At least, that’s her latest accusation. Harry is our mother’s favourite. Not just because he’s the youngest but because she had a hard time having him. He’s good at sport, so our father quite likes him as well, and he plays the oboe in the local youth orchestra. He’s also very handsome. In fact, he’s so good at everything I ought to hate him, but I don’t. I like him a lot, and am very proud of him. We get on fine. He wants to be an acoustical engineer.

‘I’m not good at sport, play the piano well enough to annoy anyone who happens to listen, am not particularly handsome, and prefer to be on my own than in with the crowd. So you see, I’m piggy-in-the-middle in our family, and also the odd one out. But I don’t mind because I’ve always had a special kind of feeling for my grandmother and she for me. Mother says that from the time I was born Sarah took me over. It was she who insisted I be called Jacob after my grandfather. Mother was happy with that,
but Father was against it.’

‘Why?’

‘Dad never knew his father of course, because of Jacob dying before he was born. But you know all about that. Sarah told me Dad was conceived on Grandad’s last weekend leave just a few days before he was sent to the battle. And besides, Dad has never been happy about the way Sarah idolises Jacob—that’s what he calls it—and romanticises—his word again—their three years of marriage. He says it’s unhealthy. No relationship, he says, is ever as perfect as Sarah makes out hers was with Grandfather, no matter how much the two people are in love. I wouldn’t know. All I know is she never married again. She’s had quite a few men friends, but she always says none of them ever matched up to Jacob. I think she feels that somehow his death didn’t end their love but sealed it for ever. She’s very determined, is Sarah. Once she’s decided about something, that’s it, no changing her mind. Pigheaded, Dad says.

‘Not that Dad and Sarah have ever really got on. They’re chalk and cheese, Mum says. Leave them on their own in a room together and after five minutes the third world war starts. And Dad certainly has a hang-up about not having had a father. Whenever I used to complain about anything to do with him, he would always say, “You should be grateful you’ve got a father to complain about.” But that would only make me more annoyed. Once, it annoyed me so much, I shouted at him that he was the one who ought to be grateful, because I wished I didn’t have a father, and certainly not him. I was about eleven at the time. I think I meant it as a sort of angry joke, you know how it is when you’re having a family row. But that’s not how Dad took it. It was the only time all through my childhood when I thought he was going to hit me. He didn’t, he’s very antiviolence. But he was more upset than I’ve ever seen him. He rushed out of the room and disappeared in to his
workshop—he’s a big do-it-yourself addict—and didn’t reappear for ages. Mum was furious with me. A mega telling-off ensued. Much to sister Penny’s satisfaction, I might add.

‘Dad and I got on all right while I was young, till I was about ten. And then I don’t know what happened. Well, a number of things actually. Dad finally accepted that I didn’t think football was a matter of major importance in life, and that I was never going to be a do-it-yourself fanatic either. I didn’t like the way he and Penny started behaving with each other, he really did become obsessed with her, and still is. Anyhow, we started having serious rows.

‘I know it must sound silly, but the turning point was one day when I was about thirteen and I suddenly realised I didn’t think Dad’s jokes were funny any more. And that was it. After that he was just this man who happened to be my father and was mostly an embarrassment, a sort of relic from the nineteen sixties. With his long straggly hair thinning on top. And his stupid granny glasses. And a permanent appearance round the eyes of having just got up after not having gone to bed. Then there’s his roly-poly midriff hanging over his factory-distressed jeans that show off his slumpy bum. He looks like John Lennon gone to seed. John Lennon—
who else!
—being his personal idol and the music of the Beatles the height of his musical taste. Sarah always says he was badly infected by what she calls the sponge-brain flower-power toxins wafting over the Atlantic from America in the late sixties when Dad was in his twenties. By the way, he and Mum met at a Rolling Stones so-called concert. Pardon me while I chunder.’

Jacob paused, aware that he’d allowed himself to be carried away, the telling taking over the story. Had he overdone it? Geertrui’s eyes were closed but he knew she was listening, and an amused smile encouraged him to continue.

‘Anyway, that’s how it was when I was fourteen and
Mum had to go in to hospital for a big operation, which was followed by weeks of convalescence. Father and Penny could manage the house between them, and because Harry was, well,
Harry
, he was all right. But not me. I was a problem. The first week Mum was away the rows between Dad and Penny and me got really bad. So Sarah suggested I go and live with her till Mum was home and well again. To ease the strain on us all, she said. And for once Dad agreed with her.

‘Sarah’s house is a cottage in a village about four miles from my parents’, so I can easily cycle home if I need to but at the same time I’m far enough away for us all to be out of each other’s hair. And, as I told you, Sarah and I get on really well. We like the same things—music, reading, going to the theatre and stuff like that. And we both like to be on our own quite a bit of the time.

‘Eventually Mum got well again. It took about four months. But by then I was so happy at Sarah’s I didn’t want to go back. Which pleased everybody, I need hardly tell you. Except Mum. I haven’t said, have I, that I love Mum a lot. She hasn’t got stuck in the sixties the way Dad has, and she hasn’t gone to seed either. Not that she tries to behave like someone young, I don’t mean that. I suppose I mean she’s kept up with her proper age but stayed young inside. Actually, Mum is the one Harry gets his good looks from. And he’s very like Mum in his ways, which must be why I get along so well with him. I know Harry is her love child, as Sarah puts it, but I don’t mind because I also know Mum and I are friends. Which I’ve come to think is the best thing anyone can say about a parent. I’ve always been able to tell her anything and talk anything over with her. So Mum and I talked it over and we decided I should stay on at Sarah’s but that I was always welcome to go back if I want to to what I don’t any longer think of as home.

‘Which is how I came to live with my grandmother.’

*

Hospital noises filtered in from the corridor.

Geertrui’s eyes opened.

For the first time her head moved.

They looked at each other, eye-to-eye.

At last Geertrui said, ‘And have you forgiven him?’

‘Forgiven who?’

‘Your father.’

‘Forgiven him? What for?’

‘For being your father.’

The question tripped him. ‘Do I …? Have I …?’

Geertrui waited a moment before asking, ‘Are you glad you are alive?’

Jacob took a deep breath. His heart rate increased and he felt himself blush. For a fading moth this lady had the attack of a Rottweiler.

He managed to say, ‘Yes. Well, mostly. Sometimes not. I get depressed now and then and wish … Sarah calls them my mouse moods and says I’ll probably grow out of them.’

Geertrui gave a short dry chuckle that sounded like walking over gravel.

‘Blame biology,’ she said.

He wasn’t sure whether or not she was being ironic. But he was glad of a chance to smile and say, ‘Yes!’

Geertrui’s head turned away and her eyes closed again.

After a silence she said, ‘Daan has explained you what is to happen to me?’

He could only nod, even though she wasn’t looking.

‘Do you understand?’

Another deep breath before he could reply, ‘I think so.’

‘Do you approve?’

‘I don’t—’

‘No.’ Geertrui stopped him. ‘Approve is not the word. It’s not for you to approve or disapprove. Wait.’