Snowleg (25 page)

“Milo?” repeated Frieda on his next visit. “Not very German.”

“I was very close to my grandfather.”

“What about your other grandfather?”

“I don't know his name.”

So Milo it was. Frieda's last concession.

Until Milo was born, Peter's instinct had been to deny him, but this vanished at the first touch of purplish skin, and the spectacle of his son looking so serious and vulnerable (and so remarkably like his grandfather), prompted a visit to a building in Otto-Braun-Straße in former East Berlin. To settle once and for all the identity and fate of his father, he applied to see the Stasi file of Henrietta Potter.

He queued for two hours, at the end of which a harassed-looking woman told him flatly that the file was restricted to the file-holder.

“But my mother lives in England. Could she not give permission?”

A form was produced. Yes, the authorities might agree, there was a slender chance. But the process could take four years. And first Peter would have to return to England.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“I.
DON'T. WANT. TO
.”

His mother stamped her foot and looked furiously out of the window. The rain had been pelting onto the lawn for three days. No prospect of a picnic.

A morning in early June, 1997. Yet again he had come back unexpectedly. His mission this time: to persuade his mother herself to apply for her Stasi records.

“Well, I would like to read them,” reaching into his jacket.

“Then, read them, why don't you?”

He hadn't brought Milo with him and she was taking it out on him. In one of her letters she had written: “Ros heard from someone that I was a grandmother. And you never told me.”

“I've already explained it to you, Mummy. Only you can read your file.”

“How ridiculous.”

“That's the law.”

He produced the documents that he wanted her to sign. The first gave him power of attorney. The second attested to the fact that she was too ill to travel to Berlin.

“But I'm not ill at all.”

His mother, if anything, had become more herself. More eccentric. Still batting whatever she didn't wish to discuss into the attic in her head. He had always hoped that old age would deliver her to him, but she had contracted away to a territory more or less defined by her piano stool. “The sheer density of Beethoven”, Rosalind had joked in her most recent letter, “has caused Daddy to threaten to go and live in North Africa.”

“I take Honey for a walk every day. If it wasn't raining cats and dogs I'd be outside right now. Rodney's the one who's ill.”

Rodney was in the dining room, uncorking a bottle of Moroccan red. Peter had been shocked at the change in him. His Derbyshire neck had become Derbyshire throat. Derbyshire lungs.

“I don't want to bring Dad into this.”

“Well, don't, then.”

Beyond the noise of rain, Peter could hear Rosalind preparing Sunday lunch. Her catering business was blooming – as was her waistline – and although she had use of their grandfather's flat she preferred to sleep in Peter's old room, at the rear, overlooking the fields. His sister struck Peter as depressed. She was unmarried, with no plausible husband on the horizon – unless one counted Silkleigh – and the thought crossed his mind and left it that she might be a lesbian.

“Ros, do you think it's healthy to live at home at thirty-three?”

“Probably not – why do you ask?”

“You can't have much of a nightlife here.” And glanced around at the renovated kitchen and the blue French pots that dangled from the ceiling, easy for her to reach and for Rodney to pass under, but which Peter bumped his head into. So too, he suspected, did their mother, who, happy to hand over the cooking reins, seemed to deal with the new situation by never coming into the kitchen at all.

“Nightlife! That's a good one. The best I can hope for most nights is not to smell of onion.”

Secretly, it relieved him that Rosalind was living at home. Their parents would never go hungry. She would keep an eye on them. But his sister wasn't concerned by their parents. “You criticise my life, Peter, yet you're the one who seems miserable. Did you ever find that girl?”

“No.”

“I'm not sure any more if it would be remotely kind of you to walk into her life. Because I've seen you walk out of Daddy's life. As soon as you knew you had a father somewhere else, you were gone. What are you going to say to your father if you find him? I haven't seen you, Peter, for more than about a week since you were eighteen and a quarter, and I'm your sister, remember?”

All weekend he had had to endure her chastisement. “You know, Mummy brags about you horribly. The longer you stay away, the more illegitimate children you have, the more passionately they adore you. It is outrageous.” And she poured another glass of Harvey's Bristol Cream. “It really is outrageous.”

“I won't.” He flattened his hand, refusing her offer of a top-up.

“What I want to know is, why are you never here?” she went on. “Remember when Mummy broke her hip and I rang and asked: ‘What are we going to do?' You replied: ‘Take her to Odstock.' But that wasn't what I meant. Oh, why are the ones who go away always let off the hook?”

It annoyed her, too, the way that Peter tried to make these visits his own by not announcing when he was coming. On this occasion, he had arrived home to a cold empty house. Rosalind out working and his parents at a drinks party. Notwithstanding the rain, his mother had turned off the central heating so that he couldn't even take a bath. He had crawled into bed under a dodgy electric blanket which at the last moment he decided not to turn on. He thought, How do these people live like this? Say what you like about the Germans, they had sorted out central heating.

“Well, what do you expect?” Rosalind said. “You never give us any warning. You show up and everyone's supposed to drop everything. It's always about you –
your
timing.”

In the living room he put his arm around his mother's once-firm shoulder. “I'm a doctor, Mummy. I'll write that your husband's too ill to allow you to travel.”

“Is that ethical? I mean, when I'm perfectly all right?”

“Mummy, please!”

“What good will it do, Peter?”

“It's my last chance to find out.”

“Find out what, for God's sake?” stamping again.

“Drinks, everyone,” announced Rodney, nudging open the door with the tray.

“If he's alive. His surname.” And went to help his stepfather.

It was still raining in the morning. Everywhere in the garden puddles, and overhead summer thunder like a heavy bed being dragged across the sky. Rodney had left his yellow scarf on the kitchen table and Peter went to take it to him. He was surprised to find Rodney in the doorway of his studio, not sheltering but exposing his goitre to the flinch of wind and rain.

“Ah, that's where it is,” and looped the scarf in a delicate knot around his neck.

“Dad, tell me what they're telling you,” Peter said.

“Don't worry yourself, I'm in good hands,” Rodney assured him with his light laugh. The steroids had given him a moon face. “They say it's manageable. That's what they say.”

“Then, tell me what they're asking you to take.”

“Perhaps you should tell me what they're asking you to take? We hear so much about young people on drugs. I sometimes ask myself whether my friend Silkleigh isn't on some narcotic. Extraordinary chap. Knows a few things, as your sister will tell you. He's become thick as thieves with Rosalind. He has this interest in a restaurant in the casbah. Said it would be marvellous if she came out to Abyla and taught the staff how to cook. Even offered to put her up in his spare room. She's been there several times and loves it. In fact, I have a mind to go myself.”

Peter let him finish, then followed him into the darkroom, where he had some prints to make. Last Saturday, Camilla Leadley's third baby had been baptised in Sutton Mandeville.

In silence Rodney mixed the chemicals. Soon the room was filled with the acid scent of the fixer and the sweeter fragrance of the developing fluid.

“So,” said Rodney, drying his hands. He looked at Peter, at the ropy hair and the dark skin, as if wanting to see himself in his stepson and not able to. “I have to think hard to calculate how long you've been away.”

“Ten years.”

“Is Odysseus coming home?” gently.

“Sorry, Dad. Not yet.”

Rodney turned off the lights. Leaving just the yellow safe-light on. Peter watched him slide the negatives into the enlarger.

“You must know it breaks your mother's heart that you won't come home. She doesn't understand why you can't at least call. OK, you're building your career, but there are six-month periods when we don't hear a thing. I don't mind very much, but your mother does.”

The enlarged image appeared on the sheet of white paper. Peter recognised the freckled features in the black face. All Rodney's stalwart artistic ambitions come to this. Camilla Leadley née Rickards. Holding Leadley's daughter over the Saxon font.

Rodney went over to collect the paper, a soft light bouncing back into his face that had taken on a look of stranded consternation.

He tried again. “Your mother would love to see your son. Even a photograph . . . You know your mother – heck, Peter, can't you see how much we miss you?”

It was another two days before his mother capitulated, and only after she had extracted a promise that next time he would bring Milo. On the day before Peter flew back to Berlin she allowed him to drive her to Salisbury, where he had made an appointment with Rodney's solicitor.

“Where do you want it – here?” and rapidly, as if signing a warrant, she wrote her signature.

She had always tried to leave it as a fairy story, but as they returned to the car, she said: “You know, it's not what I wanted” – and instinctively reached out to touch his cheek as if to acknowledge there had been compensations, but that these would be greater if her son stopped playing at being a German and came home. To this end she had left beside his bed, along with an article on “Passports for Pets”, an advertisement scissored from the
Blackmore Vale
. Placed by the Salisbury District Hospital, for a senior gerontologist.

“What stops you from applying? Odstock's a very good hospital. Rodney swears by it.
This
is your home, darling, not Berlin.”

But there she was wrong, and he felt himself fleeing the undertow of her maternal affection. He thought, I wonder if I can ever be English again. Berlin is home because it's little Milo's home. Germany is home. Even the East would have been home in the sense that I was once in love in East Germany.

“It's Gus,” he replied. “I can't come back till they change the rabies laws.”

“Oh, nonsense,” she said, doubly irritated. With herself for giving him the dog in the first place. With Peter for using Gus as a reason to justify these brief surprise visits.

“Mummy, are you not interested in what happened to my father?”

“Of course I am, but there comes a moment, as you will one day find out, when for your own sanity you have to say
Genug
! At the moment I'm far more interested in my little grandson. You won't forget to send photographs.”

“I won't forget to send photographs.”

“What about his mother? Will you marry her?”

“I offered to, but she said No.”

Frieda had wanted his child but not Peter. He didn't blame her. He had treated others no differently, taking only the crumbs he needed.

“This isn't the way, darling.”

“All these lanes look the same to me.”

His mother stared out of the windscreen. “You know, I don't think I've ever been down here before.” Then: “Look at that blue comfrey. It seems nice, but don't ever let it in your garden. It's a complete thug.”

After they had finished the lumpy gazpacho that Rosalind had left for them – a leftover from a wedding reception at Wardour – Peter borrowed his mother's car and drove to the post office in Tisbury. He wanted the application out of his hands.

“Can this go Special Delivery?”

Laboriously, with one or two crossings out and spilling across several lines of the space for the address, the postmaster copied the words into his ledger: “Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik”.

“And how are you finding Berlin?” sniffed Mr Hesmond at last. His counter still gave off the comforting aroma of a polish that Peter had never smelled beyond this room. “A few more Germans than you'll find in Tisbury, I'll wager.”

June 12, 1997, said the calendar showing Old Wardour Castle on the wall behind: 14 slow years and more since his denial of Snowleg.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I
N HER ARTICLE ON
the guard dogs, Frieda had written this: