Snowleg (28 page)

“This is Milo,” said Peter, removing the tube from his mouth and leading him to her bed. “My son.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

W
HEN
P
ETER VISITED
F
RAU
Weschke the following Tuesday afternoon, he found her books littered about the floor and her mug upturned over a month-old copy of the
Leipziger Volkszeitung
. The room smelled damply of white wine.

“It's not me!” she wanted him to know. “It's him.” Milo lay under her bed, a brown crayon in his hand. “He came in here and he knocked my cup over.”

“I'll take him away.” Peter always tried to get to the Lion's Manor before the children, but as he was leaving the Hilfrich Klinik his longest-surviving patient had had a stroke.

“No,” she said. “He'll learn.” She looked from father to son. “I tell you what. You won't go missing yourself while he's alive.”

He stood over Milo. “What are you drawing?”

“River crabs,” said Milo without looking up.

She had been describing for him how, as a young girl Milo's age, she used to catch brown crabs on the Pleiße. How they clung to the willows, very intelligent, very fast, and you had to creep up behind them.

“Maybe, Milo, you ought to go –”

“No.” Frau Weschke looked at Peter sharply. “Let him stay. I had a child too, but no more.”

Milo scrambled to his feet. “Look!”

Frau Weschke inspected his drawing and the smile warmed her face like a sable pelt. “Now
that
is what I call a river crab,” in an altered voice. “Put it there so I can look at it. That's right, above the other one. And to think, Milo, you haven't seen a river crab! I tell you, it's not easy to catch them even if you do see one. And now I'm told they don't exist,” she went on with a sigh. “But perhaps you know the taste, Herr Doktor? Didn't you eat them that time you went to Leipzig?”

“No.”

She picked up her mug. The afternoon sun in her bone-white hair. “Well, if you didn't eat river crabs what on earth did you do in Leipzig?”

She waited for his reply. Even Milo seemed interested to know his answer.

“I was part of a theatre group,” he said carefully.

“You used to be an actor?”

“Only in the operating theatre,” he tried to joke.

“No, I'm serious. Were you ever an actor?” her question bowed with implication.

“It was a mime. I was in charge of the lights.”

“A mime?” She received the news with a strange look. She opened her mouth and with a scrawny finger traced the empty runnel between her eyes and down her cheek as if her face was not a face but an old right of way grown over with grass and wire and rusted cars. She went on looking at him and was on the verge of saying something when they heard the sound of children shouting.

A knock. A head poked round the door. “Come on, Milo,” said a formidable lady with a whistle.

“See you on Friday,” said Peter. Kissing the top of his head and breathing in the smell of crayon.

“Goodbye, Milo!” Frau Weschke called after him, her voice sounding faint. Distracted, she turned her head to the window.

They were alone in the room.

“Why don't I take you outside?” he said on an impulse.

She went on staring out of the window. Educating her eyes to sit still. Outside, the trees in white fur and two skaters curving backwards.

“Did you –” she began with great effort, but he interrupted.

“We can walk down to the lake.”

She sipped from her mug. “Tell me about Milo's mother.”

“I knew her for a month before she got pregnant.”

“Do you live together?”

“No.”

“Tell me I'm speaking out of turn, but have you ever married?”

“No.”

“You have loved nobody?”

“No, that's not true. There was someone.”

She turned. “Herr Doktor Hithersay, you know who is the unhealthy person in this room, don't you?” “Come on,” before she could speak again, “it's a beautiful day.” She embedded her stare in the door, still piecing something together. “All right,” she said, as if she didn't want to reach a conclusion. “If you bring me my coat.”

Frau Weschke insisted on putting on her coat herself. Her arm slipped through the torn lining and got lost in the sleeve and the coat settled on her bowed shoulders like an awkward cape. He tried to rearrange it, but she turned out of his reach. “This way my fingers will stay warm.” Her annoyance seemed a continuation of a lifelong argument with someone. “Fetch me that,” she said brusquely.

He unhooked from the end of the bed the black cane. She gripped its silver horse-handle and with her other hand held onto his arm and they descended the staircase.

“What's that dog doing there?”

He introduced them. “Hello, Gus,” she said, and to Peter, “Something's wrong with his eyes.”

She shuffled forward and stopped. “You know the difference between a man and a dog? If you rescue a derelict dog and take it in and feed it and nurture it, it doesn't bite you.” She looked down at the floor, avoiding Peter's eyes. “Can Gus come too?”

He untethered the dog from the hat-stand and the three of them passed into a dark loggia with its ceiling of carved teak and out onto a glassed-in veranda where two children from the kindergarten played Skat with an old man in a blue dressing gown.

“Twenty,” said the boy.

“Twenty-one,” said the girl.

“I'm passing,” said the old man.

“Uli, Katarina, Petra.”

The old man raised a waxen hand. Deafness cocked his head at the angle of a vintage car. “Afternoon, Herr Doktor.”

“How are things going?”

What was that?”

“I said how are things going?

Uli waved his hand as if chasing a fly.

It was one of the pleasures of being with old people. The ice above him – encasing him – melted. He felt light.

At their first meeting, he had grown unusually alert, almost happy, when Frau Weschke asked him to relate the story of his father. Conscious of her critical regard for him, he had looked forward all week to another afternoon in her company. Her abrupt change of attitude mystified him.

On the lip of the slope she paused and lifted her cane. A dense flock of swallows dipped out of the clear sky and flew between the lime trees, settling on the tower's lead dome. “That's early for swallows,” she grunted.

“Everything's out of joint,” he agreed and mentioned how at the hospital there were swallows already outside his window. They had arrived out of a gore-stained sky two days before and begun to build a nest under the roof.

She stared around vacantly. “I like swallows. But the way we live is destroying our planet.”

The pale sunlight fell on her coat. A cormorant with a broken wing.

“Isn't that coat a weight on you?”

“No. Just my age. Come on, Gus.”

The path descended under the trees to a concrete balustrade beside the lake. Down they went, right to the water's edge. Green lichen speckled the concrete and the sunlight flared in a trembling web over the pillars.

Frau Weschke had to stop to lean against the balustrade. He waited while she caught her breath. “In Leipzig, I had a garden,” she said, looking back up the lawn.

Wriggling past them, Gus thrust a grey muzzle through a gap in the pillars and barked.

“Look, look!” Peter pointed. Two swans curled against the sky. Wings creaking, searching for a hole in the ice.

In a gruff, muddled voice she said, “You like swans? I think of them as large white pigs with feathers.”

The swans flew on towards the opposite bank. On the lake a skater waved and Frau Weschke gave a tiny regal salute with her sleeve.

“Now,” smiling, “I think we might go up.”

He offered his arm, but she was determined to return on her own. Halfway up the bank she stumbled. When he went to take her hand all he touched was a cuff.

“Let me help you put this on properly.”

“No, no. I like it the way it is.”

He ignored her. He disentangled her arm and guided it back through its proper sleeve. “You should get that sewn.”

She smoothed the thick fur with the hand he had liberated. “You only get a good fur if you treat animals right. My husband gave me this on the day of our marriage. When he put it on I was the Queen of Sheba –” She glanced around to see what on earth he was doing, but already he had scooped her up and was carrying her in his arms towards the veranda. He swivelled her through the door and her expression, which had started out as one of implacable hostility, changed as she met Uli's startled eyes.

Whatever it was that bothered her about the Herr Doktor, she had to admit that she had loved her ride up the bank.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

F
RIEDA INSISTED THAT
P
ETER
, on the weekends when he had Milo, would collect his son on Friday evenings and return him on Sunday nights. But this weekend she had an interview to do for
Tagesspiegel
. “You can have Milo for four days because I'm going to Leipzig.”

“What are you doing in Leipzig?”

“Can't say. Read about it in the paper.”

That was unlikely. He found her journalistic morality more unappetising than he would tell her, built on stilts of gossip and envy and allowing Frieda to peer from an affected height into the mess of people's lives, as if her subjects were in reality beneath her – and her own time, by contrast, more exciting and valuable. Her profile on him had drawn complimentary remarks from colleagues at the Hilfrich Klinik, but after reading the opening paragraph he had never got round to finishing it. Another thing that enraged Frieda.

“Well, next time I go to Leipzig,” he said, “can you look after Milo for four days?”

“I'll bring him on Friday afternoon to your place,” ignoring his tone. “Two o'clock. Sharp.”

After her call, Peter found himself tidying up. The chaos in his apartment seemed to exaggerate the absence of someone who could, as Corinna would have put it, “look after” him. The living room was no bigger than his bedroom, low-ceilinged with two small windows that faced the railway line. One shelf of English books mixed with medical journals and CDs, a leather easy chair with a rip in the arm, a television and video (Frieda had insisted on this) and a faded orange sofa-bed – that was all his furniture, apart from the seventeenth-century oak refectory table from the vicarage in Tansley on which he piled his dirty plates.

Milo slept in the largest room, the walls decorated with his drawings of animals and with skeletons that glowed in the dark. At the end of a narrow corridor, behind a door on which Peter hung a dark blue suit and tie – the only tie he possessed and which he kept for official occasions – was his bedroom. Two pairs of trousers, their underpants and socks still in them, vied for carpet space with abandoned shirts and trainers.

Even if Frieda didn't come in, it gave Peter satisfaction to know that his fifth-floor apartment in one of Charlottenburg's dingier streets was not in the state she would expect. But he was tidying up for Milo's sake as well. It had upset Peter when Frieda seized on Milo's chicken pox as a pretext to keep him home. As a result, he and Milo hadn't spent proper time together for a month. The only glimpses he had had of his son were at the Lion's Manor. Encounters which felled him.

An emergency kept him at the Klinik in the early afternoon. He got home just as Frieda was driving away and he had to follow her for some distance, flashing lights. They argued in the road, Milo observing everything from the back of her car.

“I've been waiting half an hour,” she shouted, so angry that her shawl slipped from her shoulder. “Why didn't you ring, you bastard? Don't say you don't have my mobile number . . .”

He rescued the pashmina from the tarmac and in his most rational tone explained about Albert, his long-standing patient from Linz who had suffered another stroke. It was something that he knew annoyed Frieda, the way his voice went very quiet and polite when upset. She considered it overly English and hoped that her son wasn't going to inherit this trait.

“You have Milo once every three weeks, for fuck's sake,” snatching back the shawl. “Can't you give up something to be with him?”

He peered into the car at their only point of contact. Scrunched his eyes at the serious face in the window, wanting to make it laugh. “Then please, Frieda, next time he's ill, I'd like to look after him.”

“You would, would you? You mean you wouldn't dump him on Schwester Corinna?” letting rip at the top of her voice. “Does that mean next time he's ill you'll give him a revolting kebab from your normal street-stall and keep him up all night and not bathe him properly so that he comes back sunburnt and dirty? Why is it that the clean clothes I dress him in never come back? How many toothbrushes do I need to buy? Do you think I'm made of toothbrushes? For God's sake, this time
you
buy a fucking toothbrush. Prepare. Have things there. Absorb the fact you have a child.”

“All I'm saying, Frieda, is that I'm perfectly capable of looking after him.”

“Then why didn't you notice when Milo broke his ankle?” almost screaming now. “You kept saying: ‘I'm sure it's fine – if not I'll take him in tomorrow.' And what happens when you take him in? He has to be given intravenous Valium! I tell you, next time Milo gets ill, I'm not letting him within 20 kilometres of his so-called father. I'd rather he go to the emergency ward.”