The One I Was (3 page)

4

As promised, the morning’s lessons continued in English. Benny felt the wires in his brain fizzing with new meanings. Maths involved problems using pounds, shillings and pence.

‘One shilling and sixpence,’ he said in halting English, responding to a question about the total paid for a basket of groceries.

‘One and six.’ Dr Dawes gave him an approving nod. Benjamin Goldman, known for being lightning quick at sums back home, was finding this all very hard but knew he had a position to maintain. He thought briefly of Rudi, how Rudi would day-dream during maths, only paying attention when the teacher stood, ruler in hand, over his desk.

The same shriek that had woken them sounded through the window. The boys looked at one another, unsettled. Dr Dawes smiled. ‘A peacock.
Ein Pfau
.’ He wrote
peacock
on the blackboard, with a little picture of a bird with feathers fanned out behind it.

At break Benny took his football outside to the large lawn on the south side of the house and kicked it around with the other boys. He managed a good goal, one that would have been hard for Rudi to have managed. It was fun playing here at Fairfleet with these boys. But there was still a numb ache under his ribs when he thought of how he’d played football with his friend back in Germany. The peacock stood on the terrace, observing them. At least it had stopped that frightful screaming. Its tail lacked the bright blue feathers of those he’d seen in pictures. Perhaps they moulted.

‘Let’s play again after lunch,’ David said.

‘Only if we speak in English,’ Benny answered.

‘Ha ha.’

‘Seriously.’ He picked up his ball. ‘You want to play with my football, we use English. Only English.’ He said the last two words in the language itself.

The others exchanged glances. ‘Aren’t you taking this a bit too seriously?’ Rainer asked. Benny felt a little prickle of unease. He’d be marked out now as a teacher’s pet. He didn’t care. Back home it had always mattered to him what other boys thought. Not now. Becoming English mattered most. If the others felt differently, well, that was their choice.

‘Do you think the lake’s frozen?’ Rainer broke the tension by pointing at the stretch of water. ‘We could go skating.’

*

Every other night they had baths. The first few times it was easy to make excuses and dawdle so he was last and the others had left the steamy bathroom. But one night Rainer forgot his pyjama jacket and barged in as Benny was drying himself on one of the fluffy new white towels they’d all been given.

Benny felt Rainer’s gaze.

‘You’re slow tonight,’ the other boy said, plucking his pyjama jacket from the tiled floor and walking out. Benny took in a deep breath and let it out very slowly, watching the air condense on the mirror above the sink and turn into little drops of water.

‘I am becoming an English boy,’ he told his misted-over reflection. The real Benjamin Goldman was already a vague approximation of his former self.

*

As days passed it was easier and easier to become English. Benny started to think like the new person he’d become: the refugee who was blood-keen to suck up the new language and way of doing things. If the English held their cutlery a certain way, well, Benny would watch carefully and hold his knife and fork their way. If they drank tea with their breakfast, so would he.

When he met Alice Smith on the staircase he’d nod at her, ignoring the watchful expression in her pale green eyes. How easy it was if you acted like this: shrugged off any disapproval. At first the other boys had muttered about Benny’s insistence on speaking English at all times, regarding him as a teacher’s pet, as he’d anticipated. He’d relaxed a little now, allowing himself to talk to his room-mates last thing at night in their old language for a few minutes.

Lord Dorner, whom they still hadn’t seen since arriving at Fairfleet two weeks earlier, had ordered crates of toys from Hamley’s, which was apparently a large toyshop in London. The boys pulled English board games out of a crate.

‘We had this at home,’ Rainer said, pointing at a box set of Monopoly. ‘But with Berlin streets.’ There were Ludo and Scrabble as well. The largest crate contained a table-tennis set and bats. And a train set. Miles of track, a dozen engines, sleek liveried carriages, station buildings, bridges, points. Looking at them made something churn in Benny’s stomach.

‘You can take all that down the basement,’ Alice told them. ‘I don’t want to be tripping over it when I’m vacuuming.’

The older boys muttered about kids’ things, but Rainer and David carried the boxes down to one of the disused basement rooms and spent days arranging the train set on a large sheet of plywood the gardener found for them.

Benny tried to ignore their enthusiasm for the engines and points. He could still close his eyes and see the set he’d owned himself in Germany, still hear his father’s voice.

‘
You must take platform length into consideration when you’re allocating wagons. And don’t neglect the issue with the points. Or the signalling problem at that first junction.
’

‘
Leave me alone
,’ he told the voice. ‘
You don’t belong at Fairfleet.
’

‘Come on Benny,’ Rainer urged. ‘Help us get this track sorted out.’

He mumbled an excuse and walked out of the room, carrying his football. On the left of the passage a bright rectangle of light had appeared. A side door to the garden. He hadn’t noticed it before. He slipped through. The door took him out beside the tennis court. Alice Smith was shaking out rugs with a maid.

She scowled at Benny. ‘That door’s not to be used.’

‘I am sorry,’ he said.

She gave the rug a particularly vicious shake. ‘I just open it once or twice a year to air the basement. You boys don’t half try it on.’

The peacock strode towards them. Benny heard the rug flicking, Alice shooing it away. It cried at the bad treatment and Benny drove his fingernails into his palms, thinking again of tormented children.

A large oak stood at the edge of the back lawn. Benny kicked the ball again and again against its rough bark. Every slap of the leather was a slap against his own memory. When he came inside again he felt better. As long as he didn’t have to play with the trains.

*

He could be this reborn Benny during the day. But sometimes at night he remembered that he didn’t deserve this fresh chance at Fairfleet, with its soft-carpeted rooms and well-stocked library, its lawns where football could be played. His mind flitted to his old home, its tiled
kitchen with pots and pans hanging from a ceiling rack and the stove emitting its constant warmth. He thought of his father, as he had once been, years ago, tumbling him on to the ground and pretending to be a bear, chasing him round the garden. He thought of his mother as she’d been before she became ill, reading him a story before he fell asleep, buying him a bunch of red balloons once when she’d seen him gazing at the man selling them at the park gates.

Somewhere in his home town, another boy would be lying in bed. Probably not a comfortable bed like this one. That boy would be reviewing the past day: stones whizzing through the air to strike his neck as he walked through the streets, youths in uniform jeering at him.

‘
Es tut mir leid
,’ he muttered in the language he’d forbidden himself to use. ‘I’m sorry.’

He buried his face in the soft, downy pillow and begged sleep to come.

5

Weeks passed. Benny felt some of the ache inside him fade. Dr Dawes praised his rapid progress in English. And he was the best footballer, that was also clear. This status brought him grudging approval from the older boys. He still kept a slight distance between himself and the others, never hurrying to join them when they gathered for cocoa at break time or trooped downstairs to play table tennis in the basement after supper. Back home, he’d been eager for approval, to be part of the gang. He’d only ever been tolerated, not admired.

But in England even the older boys seemed to like Benny. And once there was even a near scuffle between Rainer and David about who was going to sit next to him at lunchtime.

Sometimes, at night, in the room they shared, he’d hear a repressed sob. One of the others was still missing home. Benny still hadn’t wept, too wary to relax enough. Those last days in Germany had numbed his cells. Perhaps gentler memories would eventually ooze through him until he wept like Rainer and David.

The boys had yet to meet their benefactor. Meet him properly, that was. Dr Dawes assured them that Lord Dorner had indeed travelled to Dovercourt and seen each of them. Benny tried to remember when. Of course, that middle-aged man clutching the bowler hat who’d silently approached him at the breakfast table.

Someone knocked on the door while they were studying English adjectives. Lord Dorner was dressed more casually this morning, in sleeveless knitted pullover and corduroy trousers. He entered the room as though worried he’d be told off for interrupting, as though this school room wasn’t part of his own house and he wasn’t their host.

‘You wouldn’t think he was an important man, would you?’ Rainer muttered to Benny.

Lord Dorner said little but stood with his arms behind his back, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet, as Dr Dawes listed the subjects they were studying.

‘I’m glad you are working hard. I will buy some bicycles for you so you can see the countryside when the weather brightens up,’ he said, in slow but accurate German.

Dr Dawes nodded at Ernst.

‘Sir, we like to zank you for zer games you have bought for us.’ It had probably taken Ernst all morning to master the phrase. Benny knew he could have done much, much better. English was going to be his language. Nobody would ever guess where he’d come from originally.

The door opened again. A woman came inside just as the halting winter sun came out from behind a cloud to shine directly on her. She was all shades of gold. Pale blond hair. Apricot-tanned skin. A very soft jacket made from some kind of leather or suede, the colour of honey, lined with sheepskin. Riding breeches over long, shapely legs. Boots the colour of horse chestnuts.

‘His wife, Lady Dorner?’ whispered Rainer. ‘Must be.’

‘Harriet.’ Lord Dorner laid a hand on her arm. ‘How was the flying?’ he asked in German.

‘Bitingly cold but quite, quite exhilarating.’ She replied in the same language, smiling at her husband and the boys. The smile warmed something deep inside Benny and made him sit up straighter. He knew little about women, but surely Lady Dorner was far younger than her husband?

‘Let me know if there’s anything the boys need, Dr Dawes,’ she continued in German, very clear and well pronounced. ‘Books. Comics. Sweets.’ The last word was said with a twinkle.

‘You’ve already been most kind, Lady Dorner. We have all we need.’ Dr Dawes flushed as he replied in his careful German. ‘But I am afraid we must only ever talk in English in front of the boys.’

She laughed. ‘We’re undoing all your hard work, aren’t we?’

‘Not at all.’ His blush was now deep purple.

Rainer nudged Benny. ‘He fancies her.’

With a nod to the boys Lady Dorner left. Her husband spoke quietly to the tutor for a moment. Dr Dawes removed his spectacles and wiped them on a handkerchief, looking anxious. Lord Dorner gave another shy smile, closing the door quietly behind him.

The boys went back to their adjectives: words describing nouns. Hot, warm, cool, cold. Benny wrote them out, but not in a list, using proper sentences. Dr Dawes stood beside his desk, looking at what he’d written.

‘Benny?’ He shook his head. ‘How can the sun be both hot and cool? Try again.’

‘
Dummkopf
,’ whispered Ernst, who was hardly in a position to comment.

But Benny knew he was right. Hadn’t she been like the sun? She made you warm to look at, but there was a cool poise to Lady Dorner, too: as though she’d been carved out of marble.

‘Put down your pens.’ Dr Dawes moved in front of the blackboard, rubbing an ear. ‘Now then, boys.’ The smile he attempted didn’t quite have the effect of relaxing them. ‘I have to tell you that war seems even more likely than ever. I know you’ll be worried about your families at home. Lord Dorner tells me he’ll do all he can to bring out close family members, for those of you who have them. But it’s going to be hard.’

War. An image of the people at home threatened Benny’s composure. But only for a moment.

He lowered his head back to his English exercise book, concentrating hard on the sentences. The words which others found so hard to master felt warm and pliant under his pen’s nib.

6

Rosamond

Seventy years later

‘And Benny himself is such an interesting man. This job seems just perfect for you.’ Jo, the nursing agency manager, was upbeat as she told me about the new client at Fairfleet. It meant a lot to her to match the right nurse with the right patient. That’s why she’d started her own agency, specializing in end-of-life cases.

And Benny himself certainly was intriguing. If you read broadsheet newspapers and watched documentaries you’d have heard of Benny Gault.

‘He’s reaching end stage. But is still very alert and reasonably comfortable. He needs someone who can talk to him about books, travel and politics as well as nurse him as things progress. There’s just Benny and his housekeeper. Fairfleet is a big house and she’s finding it hard to manage. I thought of you immediately.’

I’d said nothing; my head was a kaleidoscope of memories and fears.

‘Rosamond?’

I swallowed. ‘I’ll have to think about it, there’s James, you see, and …’

And so much more.

‘I know.’ A tactful pause. ‘I know you’re still getting over … But this patient really needs someone like you, Rosamond. And it’s an interesting house to live in, Fairfleet.’

I knew that.

‘I just don’t think I can.’

‘Of course you have the final say.’ But she sounded disappointed in me. ‘Why don’t you have a think about it? Talk to James?’

I mumbled something about calling her back in a day’s time. James was listening to the conversation. It was early evening and he was home on time, compensating for long nights leading up to a school drama production last week. In front of him on the kitchen table lay a pile of school books for marking.