Snowleg (26 page)

Much later it came to Peter that a man of forty – stuck midway between his birth and his death – would be, from Most's perspective, in just about the worst position to read the track and to find what he was looking for.

On a snowy March afternoon in his twenty-third year of self-exile, Peter left the Hilfrich Klinik and drove to the Lion's Manor, the breath of an old golden retriever on his neck.

He parked in a lane below Wannsee station and walked up Am Sandwerder, the bland pad of his footsteps in the snow and the wind whipping large particles into his face. Growing up in England, he had never acquired the habit of gloves and when he reached the gates he put down his Gladstone bag and puffed on his hands, waiting for Gus to catch up.

Aloof from the street, the Lion's Manor stood at the top of a steep slope leading to the Wannsee. Bold facade of wine-dark brick. Chrome-painted stone pediments. Polygonal tower. So pompous and busy and squat, in unconscious mimicry of its first owner, a Viennese shoe-manufacturer, that tourists mistook it for the House of the Wannsee Conference on the bank opposite.

Peter's first sight of the building had been on a postcard that arrived at the Hilfrich Klinik, in which Sister Corinna congratulated him on his appointment as consultant and hoped that he would continue the tradition of Tuesday afternoon visits established by his predecessor. The photograph, coloured in the over-blushed technichromes of the 1950s, made the lakeside residence appear pinker and architecturally more pleasing than it was in life. A casino for American officers after the war, the Lion's Manor had served as an artists' retreat before its conversion to a nursing home, the local authorities believing that proximity to water would benefit the patients.

In the photograph, cherry blossom grew in a garish pink line against black-painted railings and oval leaded windows. This afternoon patches of snow piled beneath the trees glared at Peter with the dazzle of accusing eyes.

“Gus!”

He scanned the street for Gus's pale coat and a feeling of disquiet gripped him, a foreboding he didn't comprehend.

The snow had turned the landscape into a spectre of itself. On the frozen lake it fell in big, shining crumbs. The rim of the Wannsee was indistinct, but emerging onto the centre of it were a pair of skaters. Watching them, Peter had the familiar sense of floating beneath a rink of thick ice. His legs were horribly tired.

“Gus!”

He gaped into the spongy whiteness and felt himself blurring, an emotion so intense that he had to reach to a railing for support, in the next instant pulling back his hand as if he had touched a hot stove. The snow emphasised his feeling of incompleteness, a sensation of being jammed and branchless as though he was impersonating the person he used to be. He had loved snow as a child, its reindeer promise, but this afternoon something about it terrified him.

“Gus!” His cry whipped the white air.

Then his dog came panting up the pavement, through the open gate, onto the long front lawn. No longer deaf and overweight and half-blind, but behaving like a city dog released into a field, veering this way and that, with no care or purpose save to run.

Peter looked at Gus making mad figure-of-eights in the snow until he wasn't seeing a grey muzzle chasing flakes that fell from the sky like pieces of wet bread, but a puppy on an English lawn, eyes gummed shut.

At the thought of England he picked up his bag, the cold getting in under his clothes and snatching his breath. It was something solid he passed through and before he walked on he glanced over his shoulder in the way of someone looking to see whether he might have left his shape behind, an earlier self who watched him through the gate in ghostly surveillance.

Two nurses came out of the tower-room. The older closed the door behind them.

“She is a handful,” said the younger one. And stood recovering on the landing.

Sister Corinna took from her the clip-board that contained Frau Weschke's notes. “The Herr Doktor will be here soon. He'll have her eating out of his hand.”

The young student nurse looked up. It was the second day of her six-week rotation at the Lion's Manor. She had high cheekbones and a prominent forehead. A slight laziness in one of her eyes gave them an attractive cast. “Does he have a way with them all?”

Sister Corinna was taken aback by the directness of the question. “You could say that.”

The young nurse began to speak, but seeing something in the other's eye stopped herself.

Downstairs the door slammed and Sister Corinna felt her heart lift a little. Peter Hithersay never simply closed a door.

From along the corridor her newest patient continued to unleash her brimstone, but already Sister Corinna had tucked Frau Weschke's file under her arm.

“Nadine, come and meet Herr Doktor Hithersay.”

Sister Corinna had worked at the Lion's Manor eleven years, the last six with Doctor Hithersay. She had an intelligent face and thick chestnut hair tightly knotted in a green bow. She was widowed with two teenage daughters and at forty-seven was seven years older than Peter.

She slowed as his familiar figure came into view. He had on his blue wool Masaryk hat and under his coat the usual uniform. Black turtleneck. Black trousers. Dirty white trainers. She liked the way he violated the dress code. The sight of him inevitably produced a sense of life beyond the Lion's Manor. He might be forty, but he had the shabbiness of someone still taking pleasure in being out of a school uniform. She understood why the nurses fell for him.

Sister Corinna watched Peter unbutton his coat, the only man she had let into her bed since her husband died. She remembered the moment in her office when she became aware of him standing behind her and seconds later his hands on her shoulder. Smelling of Pears soap, kebabs, strong English tea, his leather watch-strap. There was nothing of the dormant widow in her response. He touched her in places Thomas, her late husband, had always avoided and when he scurried his fingertips over the small of her back and between her buttocks, it excited her in a way she had not been excited since as a 9-year-old in Bremen she pretended to smoke one of her mother's cigarettes. He had known exactly what to touch and how, and she recalled telling him that he had intelligent hands and then realising from his reaction that he had heard it before.

In fact, it took a remarkably short time for Sister Corinna to realise that Doctor Hithersay was not a one-woman man. Over a toasted cheese sandwich at the Hilfrich Klinik's canteen, she had had to listen to a former student of hers – Sarah, another girl with cheekbones – crow about her nights with him. The girl was blissfully unaware that he juggled many women, but Sister Corinna had seen it for herself. Oh, yes.

One afternoon, coming silently through the swing door to fetch a glass of milk for a patient, she found Peter standing against a table in a corner of the kitchen. Kneeling before him was a woman in a plum-coloured shawl. Her head in his groin.

His eyes fell on Sister Corinna and there was something cut-off and grieving about them. He said nothing. She said nothing. His mouth was tight. And on the woman went, her lips against him in greasy ecstasy. The way a young girl might imitate a porn video.

He closed his eyes as if to say “Please go”, and hugged the woman to him, not happy, not really there at all, but taking stock from a distant place like someone temporarily staying an execution. And so she retreated. Creating the dimension that would make possible their own odd relationship.

Oh, men with sad, slanted, olive eyes, you should all have been drowned in a bucket at birth.

Half an hour later, the couple came into her office.

“Corinna, this is Frieda. She's writing a profile of me for
Tagesspiegel
,” he said dismally, and Sister Corinna saw what had happened.

“How very nice to meet you,” and sweetly smiled at this slightly flushed woman with her shawl still hardly disturbed, who seemed to have no inkling that she had been observed. “I look forward to learning all about him.”

But later Sister Corinna would want to know, levering out a slice of cheesecake and transferring it to his white plate stamped with a lion rampant: “If you're going to go after these girls, why not show more discretion? It's as though you want to be caught. There are plenty of places in the Lion's Manor to have a blow-job where you're not going to be surprised. Why do I catch you every time? Oh, my God, maybe I'm not catching you every time. The mind boggles.”

He rubbed his face, his dented cheeks, and was contrite. It was terrible what Sister Corinna had had to witness. He had only consented to the interview on the understanding he talked about his research into the elderly. “But she started to get personal.”

Sister Corinna regretfully forgave him his seduction of the brooding young journalist. He always clammed up when people asked about his past. But even she could see that Frieda's prying wasn't entirely to blame. He was lonely and she flattered him. She knew about his life. He didn't have anyone to have dinner with. In this desultory way they began their affair. He liked Frieda staying overnight every now and then, and she enjoyed being there. Until she found out she was pregnant and then she just went away, having already made up her mind that he would be a perfectly hopeless husband.

Sister Corinna had learned all this at first hand some months later, but she had backed off when Frieda became pregnant, and Peter had had the discretion not to call her. Although this was not a courtesy he extended to Sarah, who had wheeled Frieda in for an epidural not knowing that the journalist was having Peter's baby, or indeed anything about his involvement with the woman shrieking on the trolley, and still ludicrously imagining that she and Peter might one day marry.

“Why didn't
I
get pregnant?” Sarah despaired to Sister Corinna.

“Come on, Sarah, then you'd be shackled to him for life.”

Once was a time when Sister Corinna might have wished this fate for herself, but no longer. She had long ago recognised that he would never be her solution nor she his. There was something barren about Peter's heart, something missing, something punitive about his unwillingness to give it all up – the 40-year-olds, the 30-year-olds, but mostly the 25-year-olds – in favour of settling down.

Sometimes when she caught his face in repose he looked like a man under the spell of a terrible passion that had torn up his life. She would have liked to ask him what was the source of his misery, but her will to improve Peter was not so powerful as her wish to preserve him as a colleague and a friend. She knew that if you went too close, or to where he had no wish to go, he simply glided away, as had threatened to happen some weeks before when she approached him with an invitation from the head of the medical council in Saxony. “Peter, I want you seriously to consider this. In the interest of reunification, I've been asked to persuade you to give a talk in Leipzig. It's terribly important. They would love it and they'll pay expenses. Here are the particulars. I'm willing to make all the arrangements. You'll only be gone two days.”

“No, I won't. I don't want to go to Leipzig.”

“You didn't even give that two minutes' consideration.”

“I'm not going to discuss it, I'm afraid.”

“Don't be silly.”

“No, Corinna, I won't change my mind.”

“Peter –”

“Schwester Corinna!”

It was their most difficult moment. She had gone away disappointed, but with their relationship intact.

Her passage from lover to friend had been smoothed to an extent she couldn't have foreseen by the arrival of Milo. Soon after his son was born, she sent Peter a postcard: “Fifteen free hours of baby sitting.” It only happened two or three times a year and he didn't take advantage of her kindness, but if something came up at the Hilfrich Klinik that threatened to chip away at his already limited day they had an agreement she would take care of Milo, whom he looked after every third weekend and whom Sister Corinna had first seen throwing his smiles from a pram, face just like his father's.

Peter was always grateful for her help, not least because he didn't want to prove himself unreliable to Milo's mother, still less provide her with an opportunity to reduce his visiting rights. Frieda, as a result, was furious any time Corinna's name was mentioned.

And stealthily he had crept back. He brought Milo over to watch videos and play with her two daughters, who loved the boy. Her family were convenient for him and the arrangement suited her precisely because she had two children and hardly any spare time. But she wasn't deluding herself. She wasn't a young thing vying for marriage or children, and when one night he asked “Shall I stay over?” she said, to his relief, “No, I'd rather we didn't. We've had all that. I love Milo and I love you, but I'm not going to put my heart on the line. In fact, it's marked in my diary. February 12. The day on which I promised myself I would stop dreaming about you.”

At the sound of the curses flailing down the stairs, Sister Corinna removed Frau Weschke's file from under her arm.

“Coming,” she called in her soothing voice, the one that told a patient to sit up and eat or they wouldn't sleep a wink. And went on down the stairs.

Peter looked up and his mouth cracked into a grin that made his face longer and, she thought, sadder. “Corinna!”

He finished tying Gus's lead to the base of the hat-stand, and peeled off his hat and hung it over his coat. A fishbone of white scalp showed through his black hair.

“And who is this ravishing creature?” catching sight of the young nurse on the staircase, and crossing the hall with a bounce in his step.