The Facts of Life (3 page)

They drew away with a jolt and Sally found herself glowering out of the window.

‘Doctor?’ he asked at last and she saw he was smiling quizzically at her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘My parents are hell.’

‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘That is, they all are. You look so different,’ he added.

‘Do I say thank you?’

‘Yes. I mean, you look most elegant out of uniform.’

‘Thank you, then. You look better out of pyjamas!’

‘And you smell delicious. Like … like freshly baked biscuits.’

‘It’s vanilla essence,’ she confessed. ‘I don’t have any scent. Nothing nice anyway.’

‘You must wear it always,’ he laughed. ‘It suits you.’

She smiled, looking down at her hands then out of the window, uncertain how to take this. She disliked ambiguity.

She would have liked to have said, ‘Look, they were starting to make a fuss because they think we’re courting.’ But contented herself with, ‘It’s a nice car.’

‘It’s my old tutor’s. He hardly ever uses it. In fact he can scarcely drive. He bought it in the hope that his students would take him on outings but they tend to borrow it and leave him behind.’

‘Oh. Poor man.’

‘Not really. He has a private income and a good life.’

She smiled to herself at this literal interpretation.

‘Which college were you at?’ she asked.

‘Tompion. But only for two years. Then the war came and I was interned. I never finished my degree.’

His colour had returned and his black hair had regained its glossiness but he was still painfully thin. Perhaps he had always been thin? Perhaps he had been underfed as a child? Sally wanted to know.

‘Tell me about all that,’ she said. ‘You’ve told me nothing really. Tell me about yourself.’

‘No,’ he said, firmly. ‘Not yet. I’d rather not. Would you mind?’

‘No,’ she said and reassured him with a smile, even as her own assurance was jolted.

Edward watched her throughout the concert. He had chosen it for its accessibility, sensing her ignorance.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
, a middle period Mozart Piano Sonata and, after the interval, the
Trout Quintet
. Austrian music. Music he had missed through the years of patriotic self-censorship when every other concert seemed to be of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Parry and Purcell. It was easy to watch her because they were sitting in the back row of the Tompion Chapel choir stalls and she was leaning forward for a better view. She looked – he sought a suitably English phrase – fresh as paint. Not fresh as a daisy – that comparison was only fit, for white-socked children or a newly-laundered shirt. Paint suggested something of her glow, her sweet, unthreatening face, her flawless complexion. She was older than him by a few years, certainly older than several of the hospital nurses and many of the eager girls his friends entertained around Rexbridge, but there was an abundant healthiness to her, an energy, that left the others grey by comparison and made Edward feel ten years her senior. After the months in hospital, in basic training, in internment and the grim years before that, she seemed to offer his life a freshness that dared him to lower his guard at last, to feel again.

He looked at the nape of her neck, where lines of down curled beneath darker hair, where the skin was still pink from having been scrubbed. He smelled, through the music, a faint waft of vanilla – evocative with unwitting cruelty – and he found the very look of her released memories he had not dared to recall for a long time. He breathed in the perfume, and there was his mother, humming to herself, cheeks pink with effort, as she tried to roll out biscuit dough while reading a textbook at the same time. There was Miriam, his sister, catching his eyes in her looking-glass with her mischievous glance as, lips pinching hairpins, she curled thick hair high on her head before her first adult dance.

He had not cried once since they had hurried him on to the boat for England, as he begged them,
begged
them to come too. Miriam had been coughing when he left. She had probably been tubercular as well. Once again he prayed she had been lucky; that the disease had taken her before the cattle trucks could. For a moment these thoughts, combined with the Mozart, were almost too much for him. He wanted to sob aloud, to break through the polite Viennese spell cast by the piano. Feverishly he distanced himself with an old trick, learned at boarding-school. The music was just music. He systematically reduced it back to a neutral code, stilling his spirits by forcing his mind’s eye to trace a composer’s scribbled notes on an imaginary score.

During the interval, tea and biscuits were served from a trestle table outside the vestry door – that pervasive British tea, brewed strong as German coffee then drowned in milk as though for an infant’s softer taste. Sally bought some, laughing at Edward’s squeamishness. She made him warm his hands, at least, on her cup before they walked around the shadowy interior of the chapel, which she had never visited before. She said nothing about the music and he thought it best not to press her. When the Schubert was finished, however, and they were caught up in the small crowd pressing to leave by the narrow door, she touched him hesitantly on the back and said,

‘Thank you. That was special.’

‘Worth the trouble of tracking down those music books for me?’

‘Definitely.’

They emerged into the quadrangle, where concert-goers were standing around exclaiming at the clarity of the stars in well-rounded tones, confident of their unchallenged place in the scheme of things.

‘Would you like to hear some more?’ he asked. He knew at once, from her silence, that he had pressed too far too soon.

‘Edward,’ she said, when they had walked a few yards. ‘You’re very young. You’re what, twenty? Twenty-one?’

‘I’m twenty-four,’ he told her, piqued.

‘Twenty-four. Sorry. Well you’re twenty-four and I’m … I’m not that young. Edward, when you’re young you want one thing and then you get a bit older and you want another. People’s needs change and … Sorry. I’m being presumptuous.’ She laughed nervously. ‘Listen to me. You only asked if I wanted to hear more music. Sorry. I –’

He stopped her as they passed under the arch to the street, with a gentle pressure on her elbow.

‘And how old are
you
exactly?’

‘Edward!’

‘Well?’

‘I’m twenty-seven.’

‘So you’re old enough to know your own mind.’

‘Yes.’

‘And to do exactly as you please.’

‘Yes. I suppose so, although living with Mum and Dad makes it a bit –’

‘Sally.’ It was his first use of her Christian name. ‘Do you want to come out with me again?’

‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘Very much.’ And she kissed him lightly, on the cheek.

‘
Gut
,’ he said and laughed. She laughed too, and tucked a hand over his arm. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘What about some dinner? You must be starving. We could eat in there over the road at the Sadler Arms. I’ll pay.’

‘Erm. Edward?’ She held back, abashed by something. He knew many English girls could not go to pubs, but assumed the Sadler Arms, as more of an inn, was slightly more acceptable.

‘What is it?’

‘I had tea before you picked me up.’

‘Yes. Tea. But –’

‘Tea, Edward, as in Spam and eggs and mushrooms followed by bread and butter and a fat slice of stale dripping cake.’

‘Oh.’

‘Well don’t look crestfallen,’ she laughed. ‘Think of the money I’ve just saved you. Let’s go to the pub and you can buy me a bottle of stout and I’ll watch you eat a plate of sandwiches.’

‘Two plates, I think. I am very hungry.’

She chuckled softly.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘You hardly ever sound German,’ she told him, stopping to turn to him in the light from somebody’s downstairs window. ‘And then, hardly at all. But when you do –’

‘What?’

‘I like it
very
much.’

She drank her bottle of stout sitting in a corner of the saloon bar where other women drank ostentatiously respectable glasses of sherry or well-watered whisky. Then she shared his second round of ham sandwiches.

‘So you eat pork, then?’ she asked, direct as ever.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There are times now when I forget to be Jewish at all.’

He could tell she was curious, so he told her a sensitively edited version of his life, that he was born and raised in Tübingen to two university lecturers who were more atheist than Jewish. He told her that they had sent him to boarding-school in England in the fond belief that the English in 1936 were less bigoted than the Germans, and that the English public school system was the best in the civilised world. He told her his parents had died but not when or how. He made no mention of Miriam.

Had he known then how unrooted her own upbringing had left her, he might have been more open with her, sensing in her a kindred spirit. He had not seen his family for ten years. Wrenched away from Tübingen at fourteen he had been forced to replace them with a less stable ‘family’ of teachers, other boys and distant, if well-meaning, kindred contacts. Unlike most young men, he had been deprived of the opportunity to reassess his childhood and criticise his upbringing, and thereby gain a truer sense of maturity than a merely biological one. The break with his first thirteen years was so complete and communication with home so patchy before it was broken off altogether, that his childhood memories remained enshrined, untested by time. He might have come to see his mother’s absent-minded studiousness as a mask for frustration and rage, his father’s iconoclastic gaiety, a front for despair. He would surely have argued with Miriam over her choice of boyfriends or with his father over his cowardice in the face of petty officialdom at the university. In the months before they packed him off to England – with all their cruel-kind lies about coming to visit before long – the façade had begun to crack in places. He had overheard acrid political arguments between his father and his more orthodox, more overtly Jewish grandfather, in which his grandfather’s warnings began to dent the sarcasm with which his father armoured his fears. He had caught Miriam crying and not believed her when she said that she and her boyfriend Lorenz had merely had a ‘silly argument about nothing’. With a child’s acuity, he had detected the mounting panic behind all the tearful farewells. The grim realities of boarding at Barrowcester and the difficulty of loving the family acquaintance who took him to London in the holidays, forced him to focus all his warmer sentiments back on his absent family, and begin the process by which thoughts of his early years became fixed beneath an unyielding sugar-frosting of nostalgia.

His internment in 1940, along with other enemy aliens, and his eventual hospitalisation, had provided a neat physical expression of his abiding secret sense of immaturity which isolated him from his fellows. He was not interned for long, not shipped off to Canada or Australia like some unfortunates, since he had an eminent Rexbridge tutor to manoeuvre with the authorities on his behalf. The sense of an inexorable bureaucracy reducing human lives to numbers and personalities to mere nationality gave him, he later saw, a bitter taste of what would have been his fate in Tübingen. The eventual discovery of what befell his parents, the discovery that his grandfather’s fears were not paranoia but grounded in a political reality, isolated Edward more than ever. Given refuge by his former tutor and encouraged by him to take his composition seriously, he felt all the more marooned between lives, stuck with a false name. Neither student nor soldier, he had evaded historical destiny only to be washed up in a provincial backwater, as powerless to move as a misdirected parcel. Even when he was eventually allowed to take action and sign up to fight, he was frustrated by a disease which, yet again, stigmatised him and set him apart. Someone had to give him the impetus to enter life and start living it from the inside. This girl, this woman, had not passed by with an uncommitted smile like all the others, but had boldly reached out and pulled him in by the hand. Small wonder, then, if he was anxious not to frighten her into letting go of him by telling too much too soon.

He drove her carefully home. She made him stop at the top of her parents’ street so that the car would not wake everyone and she let him kiss her once, twice, three times on her slightly parted lips. She seemed a little unsteady as she walked away. She stopped to raise her hand to him as she opened the front door. Her white glove shone in the yellowish light from their hall.

Back at his former tutor’s house, where he rented a room he stepped quietly into the kitchen to make himself some cocoa. There was a small bottle of vanilla essence amongst a cluster of greasy spice packets in the drawer beside the stove. He unscrewed the sticky lid and took a deep sniff. It was not the same at all.

Dr Pertwee’s wilfully unromantic version of the facts of life had more to do with population control and the economics of female servitude than with technique. Sally received more detailed but scarcely more applicable sexual instruction at medical school and even there textbook and lecturer sought to preserve her perceived modesty with Latin terms, and studiously skirted any reference to pleasure. The gynaecological diagrams even left out those parts that were not directly germane to childbirth or urination so that she had to go to an ethnological study of African tattooing and ritual mutilation to find a name for her clitoris. She knew there was pleasure, naturally. Such things filtered down. Throughout her girlhood she went to the cinema, she overheard gossip on buses. There were, after all, whole industries dependent on what Dr Pertwee called romance, as differentiated from marriage. But nobody thought to instruct Sally in the less academic minutiae of the subject and she never thought to ask. Boys of her own age-group seemed hopelessly immature while the older ones, on whom she had occasional crushes, hopelessly threatening. For the most part, sex was a source of fascination but she knew instinctively to be wary of it as of a dangerous tide. As a teenager she had been consumed with the thirst to learn and escape, too busy fulfilling Dr Pertwee’s grand design to fritter precious evenings fumbling with spotty youths. Dr Pertwee drew her as far away from her contemporaries as from her parents. At that stage and until Sally had turned twenty-two, her mother appeared to approve of the tidy path she was treading.