The Sea House (20 page)

‘Yes,’ she said, before he could stop and question what was right or wrong, and she kept her eyes open, beaming at him, delirious.

Afterwards they lay in silence, admiring the overlapping colours of their limbs, marking each other with their fingertips, shining white and luminous against their skin.

It was dark when they re-emerged from the hut. ‘We could go for a drink,’ Lily suggested, as Grae looked around him for the site of his fire.

‘I’ve no money.’

‘I…’

‘No,’ he said firmly and then, ‘I’ll make a fire.’ They sat in silence while he cradled the flame, stooping and blowing to get a spark. He stacked it up with drift wood so that soon they were enveloped by a bright circle of light.

‘Look, I don’t belong to the village,’ he said. ‘I’m not welcome in the pub.’

‘Surely… you…’

‘In Steerborough’ – he sounded angry – ‘you’re either from one of the old families, or you come in with money, enough to buy a second home. I know to you it all seems idyllic. But not to real people. Not to people who need to work.’

‘I need to work.’ Lily pictured the loan she was living off, like a small mountain, narrowing to a precipice as she reached the top.

‘Well, you know they banned Guinness from the craft shop.’

‘Guinness?’

‘Our cat…’ Grae shook his head. ‘He followed me in and knocked over a jug.’

Lily rustled her thumb against her fingers, calling for the cat. ‘Guinness.’ A dark shadow slunk towards her, topped by a flash of white. ‘Have you been banned you dangerous thing?’ She coaxed the animal on to her lap, feeling the wet tip of its nose, its spray of whiskers as it pressed its head into the palm of her hand. ‘So’ – she coughed rather than swallowed – ‘what happened to your cottage? Did you have to move out?’

‘We’re in our holiday home.’ She could feel Grae bristle. ‘Everyone else has one, why shouldn’t we?’

Lily leant against his side. It’s me, she wanted to say, but of course he didn’t really know who she was.

‘We couldn’t afford the rent,’ he said eventually. ‘Once Sue went, and I had to get another car. I could have had my job back at the power station, but… It’s shift work there, and then who would look after the girls?’

‘I’m sorry.’ Christ, why did she always ask so many questions, when they’d been so happy, lying, murmuring about nothing in the dark? Not trusting herself to stop, she got up and went to fetch the wine.

‘So how come you speak German?’ Grae asked. For want of a corkscrew she was pushing the cork in with her thumb. ‘Translating letters? That’s what Emerald said you were doing all day long in your room?’

‘Well…’ So he had been watching her. ‘We did German at school, and it was something I was good at. My father was from Germany, originally…’ She hadn’t expected to be telling him this. ‘He came over when he was twelve. His parents sent him ahead… So I expect it’s in my genes.’ Grae was quiet beside her. Waiting for her to go on. ‘He was a violinist. Walter Lampl.’

Walter Lampl. She used to repeat that name to strangers to see if anyone might have heard him play, but instead they laughed and told her she was lucky she’d got her mother’s name.

‘He was in an orchestra, and when my mother… When they started seeing each other… he was already married.’ He’d been married since he was eighteen to a girl he’d known at school. He couldn’t leave her, that was out of the question. She was his only family, and he was hers.

‘So did you… spend much time with him?’

Lily tried to make it cheerful. ‘No. We never met.’

‘Right.’ Grae nodded. ‘Right.’

‘He travelled… All over the world.’

‘And were you never tempted to track him down?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know why.’ They sat watching the fire. ‘Although I did go to Germany once. On an exchange for a whole term. I went to a place called Ulm. I think my father came from Hamburg, so it was all quite pointless, and in Ulm, I hadn’t realized, they spoke a kind of dialect. Schwäbisch. It was like trying to learn English in… I don’t know… Newcastle.’

The family she’d gone to had had eight children, seven girls and finally a boy, and the father had the most enormous stomach, hard as a football, as if he were trying for one more. They’d collected Lily in a car with three rows of seats, everyone except the mother who was ill, and, while the children talked and argued, she kept thinking of Sabine, her exchange, going home alone with her mother on the tube.

‘I was twelve. I was so lonely. Even with all those children. Even after I became fluent in Schwäbisch. I wrote to my mother every day. I wrote to everyone I’d ever met.’ Grae stretched out beside the fire. ‘I’d have written to you too if I’d met you even once. And then a girl at school, Astrid, invited me to her house to stay the night. We’d been on a school trip, gone into the countryside by train, and when we arrived back at the station her mother was going to pick us up. I remember walking out on to the station steps, seeing my class jumping into their parents’ cars, watching the crowd thinning out, expecting any second that Astrid would tap me on the back. And then suddenly everyone had gone. I waited. She was bound to remember and come back. So I waited. And waited. My family weren’t expecting me. Not until the following day. But she would have to remember. Or her mother would ask why I hadn’t come. I must have waited there for hours. There was a bus station opposite, and occasionally I ran over to it, but not one of the names or numbers looked familiar. My family lived in a suburb, on a red-brick estate, and I knew the name of it, you know how it is, when you can recognize something, but can’t actually bring the words to mind? I’d got the bus home from school virtually every day, but always with the other children, and I’d read the direction on the front of the bus, but never said the words aloud. It started to get dark. There were people looking at me, watching me, so I began to walk. I didn’t know if I was walking the right way or not, and then I found myself on an autobahn. There was no pavement and cars were rushing by. Suddenly I was sure that Astrid
must
have remembered, so I turned round and tried to find my way back to the station, but now I was completely lost. And then a miracle happened. I saw my bus. Donaurieden. Of course that’s what it was. I caught it up and jumped on just as the doors were closing. But I didn’t have enough money.

‘“Please, could someone help me?” Six pfennigs was all I needed. But no one would help. There were lots of people on the bus and they all just stared at the floor. It was like being in a dream when you want to scream, charge at someone with a knife, but instead you stand quite still. And then I remembered I was half. “A half fare,” I said, “bitte,” and the bus driver shrugged and stamped out a ticket, and I was on.

‘My family were getting ready for bed when I walked in. At first no one noticed. I opened the hall door and sat on a chair and then the father saw me. “What happened?” He knelt in front of me. “Was macht’s, mein Liebchen?” He put his arms around me, and I couldn’t help it, I started to cry. I cried and cried. I couldn’t stop. His stomach was pressing into me and I could feel the damp skin of his cheek, and then I started laughing because he was the nicest man I’d ever met. “Meine kleine Mädi…” He brought me a glass of milk, and then he asked if I was Jewish.

‘“I don’t know.” I was laughing, and crying at the same time. “My father was.”

‘He nodded as if it was what he’d thought, and after that they were so nice to me. My little maid, they called me, all of them, even the woman who came in to cook when the mother became too sick. They kissed me and cuddled me and gave me all kinds of presents, and on the day before I was due to go back home they took me shopping and bought me a whole set of clothes.’

Grae’s eyes were closed, but he reached out a hand. Lily lay down beside him.

‘Sorry. I haven’t talked so much, ever. Well, not for months.’

Grae slipped his arm around her. ‘If you say another word, I’ll send you back to Germany with six pfennigs in your purse.’

‘OK.’ She pressed herself close. ‘But I just have to say one more thing.’

‘Christ.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘What?’

‘I still feel bad about it, but I never wore the clothes.’

They slept outside. Grae dragged out all three duvets and they made a soft swamp of a bed. They could hear the sea behind them, rolling in above their heads, and on the other side of the river the lights of the village flickered in the dark. The stars cascaded down above them, a hundred more breaking through each time they looked, so that eventually Lily had to force herself to turn on to her side, folding her arms around Grae’s back in order to sleep.

There was a note pinned to Fern Cottage door.
Where the FUCK were you?
It was Nick’s writing, the capitals bulging with rage.
I called for you in the afternoon. You weren’t there. I came back in the evening. YOU WEREN’T THERE. I waited all night! It’s 9.30 AM and I’m GIVING UP.
Lily looked at her watch. It was ten past ten, and she’d almost persuaded Grae to come back for a bath. She went inside and sat on the sofa. She should call Nick but then what if he stopped and turned round? She’d call him in an hour. He’d be almost home by then. She put her head in her hands to think what a deceitful person she’d become. She sat there, unable to move, the thought surfacing every so often that Grae, who was preparing breakfast, would be wondering how it could take this long to brush her teeth. Eventually she walked across to the phone box. There was someone else inside it, a woman complaining loudly about a leaking roof, and when she looked out apologetically Lily shook her head and mouthed it was all right. ‘There’s no hurry,’ she said, and she shivered as she sifted through her pockets for change.

29

Max pushed down on the smooth metal of the handle, and pressed with all his weight, three times, before he could accept Gertrude’s front door was locked. She must have risen in the dawn and checked it, unless she had purposefully shut him out? Anxious, he ran round to the back. The garden was scattered with drops of dew, held like gems in every blade of grass, and in each border the last of the summer flowers were closed against the cold. He tried the French windows and the small side door and then, finding the kitchen latch unfastened, he began to ease himself through. He had almost done it, his toes were reaching for the floor, when the edge of his jacket caught a poaching pan. The three tin sections came apart and fell, scattering and spinning on the tiles. He froze, the minute hand of the kitchen clock moving from seven-twenty-two to -twenty-three, when the pans were finally still.

Max took courage and crept up the stairs. He sat on his bed and took off his trousers, the sand spilling out of the creased tops of each leg. He unbuttoned his shirt and found one button lost, and then the passion in which his button had gone missing flared inside him. He crumpled up, the pain and pleasure of it forcing small whimpers from his throat. Elsa was there, crouching above him. What was it she was asking him? He couldn’t tell. ‘Shh, now.’ He shook his head, and he started to make love to her again. It was as if a lifetime’s knowledge had been stored till it was needed, and he began to kiss her and caress her until she was leaping and laughing in his arms.

Gertrude felt unsettled. Autumn. It often took her this way. There was a sharpness in the air that had not been there even the day before and it made her feel the need to start at something new. She turned her thoughts from London, where the busiest time of the year was about to begin, putting a harsh stop to the doubts that were liable to track her. Had she or had she not been wise to take herself away? And where was Max? Surely he couldn’t still be sleeping, it was almost ten, and, in a sudden expectation of finding him unwell, she marched upstairs and with the briefest of knocks she threw open his door.

Max’s clothes were strewn across the floor. His sheet was crumpled, the counterpane rolled into a ball, and there in the midst of a fury of blankets, he lay, exposed, on the bed. Gertrude closed the door. Her face felt tight and grey. She would ask him to leave as soon as he awoke, and then she remembered her reputation as a psychoanalyst of the broadest and most open mind. For years she had traded in fearless banter – masturbation, penis envy, anal, oral sex. But she had not expected to find a man naked in her own home. Max’s penis danced before her. The head of it, the dent of its oval eye.

She took down her wicker basket and set off for the shops where, almost blind with the surprise of hair and testicles, she stared at the noticeboard in the shop window rather than go inside. Three kittens needed a good home. A bicycle was for sale, an almost perfect Silver Cross pram. For anyone who might be interested, there was a half-finished lady’s jumper that needed three skeins of matching turquoise wool. There was an advertisement for watercolour painting.
Beginners welcome
, it said and, underneath, a sketch of a young woman staring in great concentration at the stump of a tree. The array of penises faded for the first time in half an hour. She peered more closely at the sign.
Limited places available. Contact T. Everson
.
Fern Cottage
,
The Green.

Had she needed shopping? She couldn’t remember now. Instead she set off down the street. At first she couldn’t see Fern Cottage, but then she found it, a tiny house on the corner of the lane. She knocked on the side door and waited, wondering if, when it said no experience necessary, it really meant none at all.

‘Yes?’ It was a young man, dishevelled, with a large hole in the ribbing of one sleeve.

‘I’ve come about the watercolour lessons… If… there’s still room.’ Gertrude felt shy standing there in the street. ‘I really am a beginner.’ She looked round as she said this, hoping he might ask her in.

‘Oh yes.’ He fumbled in his pocket and brought out an elaborately creased form. He leant it up against the door jamb and then, realizing he didn’t have a pen, he disappeared inside. Gertrude waited, glancing away from the vicar on his bicycle as he sped by, hoping she had not been seen.

‘Right.’ The young man was back. ‘Can I ask your name?’

‘Miss Jilks,’ she told him. ‘Will there be room?’

He flicked through his notebook, scattering scraps of paper and small sketches in smudged forms of black and grey. ‘I think there should be.’ He told her to meet him on the bridge the following morning at ten.

‘Should I pay you in advance…?’ Gertrude asked, hoping for more information, but he looked so ruffled by this that she quickly put her purse away. ‘Do I need to bring anything? Equipment of any kind?’

‘No,’ he said, as if that was something he was sure of, and he made a quick scribbled note in his book.

Max had given himself a goal. He was not allowed to visit Elsa until he had finished Old Farm. Old Farm and Old Farm Cottage would take him to the centre of his scroll. He was on his third roll of paper and if he pasted them together they would lap his room four times. Max worked fast. All fear of finishing forgotten. A sudden free style in the middle of so much painstaking work. His bricks were pink and red and brown, the Crittal windows sharp lines of metal in their new rectangular frames. Beside it, the farm labourer’s cottage was a worn heap of a building. Its roof low, its front door squeezed round to the side.
When painting a comedian,
he reminded himself of Henry,
do not try and make the picture funny.
And keeping his mind on the weight of the thatch, he carried on. It was after six when he finished, and he sat there a little longer, waiting for the colour to dry. There was a chill in the air and he pulled his jacket round him, wondering if tonight would be the night when Gertrude lit the fire. And then he remembered, Elsa was expecting him. He would not be there.

‘Elsa Lehmann,’ he told Gertrude, ‘is interested to see Henry’s letters. She thinks that maybe I should have them published.’

‘I see.’

Max was washed and dressed in clean, pressed clothes. His hair was combed and flattened, his eyebrows smoothed down. ‘“Is it better,”’ he pulled out a letter, ‘“to think of yourself as a genius although you may not be one at all?”’

Gertrude did not entirely trust herself to reply. ‘Possibly,’ she nodded. ‘It depends on whether you are delusional, or simply in need of a bit of cheering up.’

‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘I won’t be here for supper.’

‘Yes, I see.’ He was waiting for her blessing. ‘Well, I won’t wait up. But Max’ – he was about to leave – ‘are they your letters to publish? I mean aren’t letters the property of the sender?’

Max frowned. ‘Even if they’re dead?’

‘“Promising subjects are always liable to turn out badly because you get tired of them while you are carrying them out.”’ Max felt impelled to read at least one of Henry’s letters to Elsa or the lie would be complete. ‘“If you have too great an admiration for a certain person, then it is hard to make a decent drawing of them. Forget that your subject interests you at all.”’

‘Then why would you want to draw them in the beginning?’ Elsa frowned. ‘And who was this subject that was so promising?’ She came round to his side of the table and stood close against his arm. ‘When were you at your happiest?’ She planted small soft kisses on his neck.

Max pressed his fingers against the bones of her face, along her jaw line, around the socket of her eye. ‘Last night. This morning. Now.’

‘No.’ Elsa laughed. He ran one finger along the inside of her gum, skimming it across her teeth. ‘Tell me.’

‘All right.’ He drew a sheet of paper towards him. He’d make his map for her. He’d show her around his house. ‘Look.’ He pulled her down on to the edge of his chair. ‘Take the forest road from Rissen, the one that runs between the vegetable garden and the woods.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Cross the stream, there is a wooden bridge, and there in the shade of three huge trees you will find the house. Heiderose. It was built by a German poetess and above the door it read:

‘“One cries or one laughs, That is our destiny.
Life is too short, Death is too long.”’

Elsa slipped an arm around his waist. ‘You’re not allowed to miss it,’ she said. She shook her head.

‘There are two balconies on either side of the front door, for sunbathing, for looking out towards the stream, and a terrace where the cook peels vegetables when the weather is warm. Beyond lie fields, and beyond them, “the great forest”. If you walk into it, on almost any path you’ll come to a clearing where there is a pond.’ Max could feel the dark water cool between his toes, and hear with perfect ears the sounds of the farm hens. ‘But if you take any path to get home, you’ll almost never come out where you intend.’

Max led Elsa through the inside of the house. He took her through the green room with its fragile furniture, the card table, the Renoir still in its frame above the fire. He seized new paper for the dining-room, which was blue and almost filled by a round table. There was a swallow’s nest in the wall above the long windows, and while you ate you could watch birds swoop down with food for their young. The library was panelled, and beyond it was the schoolroom. It was from the window of this room that he’d first seen Father Christmas. A great knock on the window had alerted him, and then a gruff voice asking if he’d been good. Father Christmas talked of goodness, and of whipping, but happily he left then, as quickly as he had come.

Max ran upstairs, past his mother’s linen cupboard, a place of order and great beauty, where every sheet and pillowcase was bound round with pink cord, past her bedroom, also impeccably tidy, and beyond it, his father’s, a mire of clothes and books and papers. There in the walls of this room his father had made a hiding place. He’d shown it to Max once when he was young, but when, some months later, he’d crept in again to find it, he could never discover where it was.

‘Max?’ Elsa had her hand on his shoulder. She was peering anxiously into his face. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, but…’ He couldn’t tell whether he’d been dreaming, or talking to her out loud.

‘And you,’ he said, shaking himself, ‘when were you happiest?’

‘Me?’ He could see her eyes travelling backwards. ‘When I was first married, I suppose. In 1931 there was a house that Klaus designed for the director of the Deutsche Bank, and it was the most beautiful building that anyone had ever seen. I was newly married, I was eighteen, and I had no doubts whatsoever that we were destined for great things.’

‘But here, he has made himself a success? You left in time. You did everything you could.’

‘Yes, you’re right. I have nothing to feel sorry for.’ Elsa looked out at the horizon and then, turning, she led him to the bed.