The Wolf in the Attic (5 page)

I am an ungrateful ragamuffin and wholly without discipline, and utterly unaware of the behaviour expected of my sex and station, Pa – Father – told me the morning after Jack walked me home. He was very quiet, very pale, but I knew just by the set of his face that he was as angry as I have ever seen him. More than that. I think he was a little afraid, or desperate even.

He has this way of raising up his open hands until they are at his shoulders, as though he were boasting about the size of a fish he caught. Then he lowers his head, and it looks as though he wants to cover his ears. He does that when he is not just angry, but sad as well. I have seen him do it in speeches in the hall down at Keble.

He did it to me that morning, and that quiet cold tone of voice came out of him like it was a stranger he was speaking to.

And perhaps I have not been attending lately, but as I stood all hangdog in his study I noticed as if for the first time that he is different, changed from what he used to be; and I do not believe that it is wholly my fault. It is to do with the Committee, and the Colonial Office – he has been down to London again – and I think, though he has not said it, that he has finally given up all hope of us ever going home.

If anything can possibly be left of home.

N
O-ONE ELSE MADE
it out with us, from all the friends and family we knew who were still beside us on that last day. Uncle Spiros, Aunt Eugenia; they just disappeared, and my cousins with them. Pa jumped into a launch as it was pushing off from the quay, with me in his arms – and it was sheer chance that it was a British boat and not one of the American or Italian ones. Otherwise we might be living across the Ocean now, and I would have an entirely different accent.

I could be riding a horse somewhere on the Great Plains, instead of stuck in a dark, damp old house in Jericho.

B
UT THERE WAS
no time to look at the flags on the boats that day as the sailors brought them up to the seafront, to choose which country we should end up in. Father put it very well once, in a speech. He said it was a case of the Devil taking the hindmost.

That is why we do not know where Mama is buried, or if she has a grave at all. The Turks had dragged her away earlier in the day, when we were packed on the roasting quayside; thousands and thousands of terrified people, with the water full of bodies in front of us, and the roaring of the great fire behind.

I wish I could forget it; the thunder-heat of the flames, and the sound of the screaming as the Turks took away the young girls and the pretty women, and shot and bayoneted the husbands and fathers and brothers who tried to stop them.

And Pa took me from Mama’s arms when they came for her, and pressed my face into his chest until I thought I should suffocate.

When he let me look up again, she was gone, and the crowd was pressed tight around us and screaming, but I could feel his chest heaving under me, and the noise that came out of his throat was a dreadful raw howl, with no words in it, like an animal in agony.

T
HE LAUNCH WAS
desperately crowded, and everyone was wailing and the sailors were armed with revolvers – I remember them being waved in our faces, and the sharp crack as they went off. I think they made me cry even more with fright, for I was very little. And they took us out to a towering battleship, a castle of steel afloat out in the harbour among a dozen others.

So many flags were in the harbour that day, so many great warships. And they did almost nothing to help the poor people who were burning and drowning and being killed by the Turks back on the quays. A few boats were sent in, but for the most part, they sat there and their crews watched.

The last thing I remember about that day, before Pa carried me into the depths of the great ship, was the towering pillar of smoke that was looming over the city. It was majestic, immense, greater than anything I ever thought men could create, and at its base, the flames pummelled the smoke and boiled and burst and cast a far-off roar. I shall never forget it, not if I live to be ninety years old.

I
USED TO
think it might be that Mama was still alive – it might be possible – but when I said this to Pa later, in Oxford, he looked at me as though I had gone mad – I was very young – and that was the first time I think he ever hit me hard, across the face, and there were tears in his eyes as he did, I remember. I was so shocked I did not even cry, and he hugged me straight after, and said he was sorry. So very sorry.

That was a horrible thing – to see him weep, and I hate to think on it.

But we cannot choose what we remember and what we forget. All the lovely bright moments of our lives get forgotten except for remnants here and there, like the leaves blown from a tree in the autumn, and the terrible things, they stick with us forever, as bright and raw as the day they happened.

When we first came to Oxford we went to Liturgy at the Greek church off the Banbury Road. I loved the smell of the incense, and the singing was glorious, but so sad. As though everyone were in mourning. But it was beautiful too. The priests all have long beards and look like wise men straight out of the Bible, and the icons are all agleam with gold, until the face of the Madonna and the baby Jesus can hardly be seen; they are shadows surrounded by gold and jewels, not real people at all.

It seemed right and fitting to me, the dark music, the shadowed saints. As though God understood what had happened to us.

The Mother of God lived her last years not far from our old home, and St Paul wrote letters to the Ephesians, who were the people who lived there back then. I saw Ephesos once, all tall white ruins and poplars and cypresses as shapely as paintbrushes.

All that is gone now, just history in a book. But it was a real city. And the people in it were as alive as me. I lived there once upon a time, in that place which is now no more. We had been living there for three thousand years before the Turks came, Pa told me. And now it is as far away as a fairy story.

There are so many echoes and shadows of memory I should like to have kept as clear and bright as fish in an aquarium. Not the horrible last days, but all that went before. But the pictures I want to keep are fading. The more I try to hold on to them, the fuzzier they become. And dreary old Oxford grows more real by the day. Perhaps that is part of growing up, this forgetting, and the pain of remembering the wrong things. If so, it is a hateful part.

F
OR THE NEXT
few days I read newspapers, which I never normally do. Father gets the
Times
and the new local paper, the
Oxford Mail
, and I read both; even the advertisements for Palmolive soap and Bovril and tooth powder – every page. There is nothing in the
Times
about murderous gangs of marauding tramps, and there is nothing in the
Mail
about a body on Port Meadow. Skullduggery. Murder by moonlight. Not so much as a paragraph.

I am oddly deflated, and there is a squirming part of me that is disappointed. Such a happening – such a horrible event should have been noticed and set on record by someone, anyone.

Except that the anyone should really be me.

S
O ANYWAY, HERE
I am, stuck here.
Confined to barracks
is what the soldiers call it, and the barracks is the house we live in, father and me. I know most of it so well now that I could walk into any room on the lower floors blindfold and not bump into a single thing. The furniture is ancient, from the last century mostly, and it is not ours, but came with the place

T
HE HOUSE ITSELF
was built so long ago that it has no gas, so we use oil lamps as though Victoria were still Queen. And there is a hand-pump and a huge black range in the basement, and the stairs have no carpet on them and are very steep and narrow.

Father rents the place from a man called Matthew Bristol, and I have heard him call Mr Bristol a
greasy little oik
under his breath. I know Mr Bristol as a short man with cheekbones sharp as the corners of a box, a waxed black moustache, and a bowler hat which is green with age. He has very pale eyes, as pale as a robin’s egg, and he almost never blinks, but his mouth smiles all the time, as though it has been frozen open.

Sometimes he appears unannounced, unlocks the front door and walks straight through the house without so much as a by-your-leave, which infuriates father. And once he pinched my cheek and stroked me behind the ear when father wasn’t looking and I wanted to bite his fingers off, except they were yellow from smoking cigarettes and smelled horrible.

The trouble is we never seem to have enough money. Always, father is hunting around for spare sixpences and thruppenny bits at the end of the month when Mr Bristol makes his visits, and there are usually a few bread-and-dripping days around that time, and no milk for tea.

I like bread and dripping, but it gets tiresome after a while, and I begin to fantasise about eggs and bacon, crisp green apples, and toasted cheese. Toasted cheese and cocoa is the best thing to have in the world when the fire is lit and it is raining outside.

When we first came here, father had investments which he could count upon to
tide us over
. It was just as well, because we brought nothing more to England with us than the clothes on our backs, and by the time we made Portsmouth most of what I was wearing had been given to me by the dear sailors, and they made us up ditty bags and sewed me some cotton nightshirts and were awfully nice, so that I almost forgave them for not blowing the Turks to smithereens with their big guns.

So, father had money back then, and took on the tall house in Moribund Lane, with its narrow garden that backed onto the canal, and iron railings at the front. And we had a cook and a maid. Cook was a tiny red faced woman who used to like me to tell her stories of Greece while she worked in the basement kitchen. It was always so lovely and warm there, and she would never fail to make me a cup of tea which I would sip very politely at the big wooden table, since I was the lady of the house. Her name was Mrs Bramley, and I miss the warm kitchen – we cook over a miserable little spirit stove now and the basement is grey and cold most of the time.

We had a maid too, whose name was Elsie Blythe, and she was much younger than Mrs Bramley, and she set the fires and did the ironing and made the beds and brought father his breakfast in the front room, kippers sometimes, and poached eggs all runny. And I remember how baffled she was by father insisting that olive oil be set out at every meal so he could dip his toast in it.

Father used to go walking alone in Wytham Wood and forage for wild garlic, and he would rub it on toasted bread and drizzle the bread with oil and salt, and the smell was straight away like something out of a lost memory. No-one in England likes garlic or olive oil, and now even father has stopped eating it, and dines quite like an Englishman, and fries his bacon in lumps of suet, which is nice enough but not the same.

I miss Elsie. She was young, and pretty, and always had time to sit and chat with me and Pie. She had such a pale face, with big blue eyes, and her hands were always red and she would rub her knees as she sat with me and talk about the boys she was seeing. There were no young men left in England, only old crocks from the War, she used to say, and laugh. And she told me once that even a one-legged man could have a lot of lead in his pencil, and if she met one with a fat pocket-book she would be a maid no more. Not that she had been a maid for a long time. And she would nudge me and wink as she said this. She had a lovely throaty laugh, and I always liked to laugh with her, even when I could not quite understand what she was on about.

So it was all rather jolly back then, with me and Pie and Pa, as I was still allowed to call him, and Mrs Bramley and Elsie always coming and going, and the house seemed less dark and empty, and there were fires lit in every room in the winter, not like now, when they are only in the study and the front room, and I creep from pool to pool of lamplight with the cold shadows in between.

It seems that some of father’s investments didn’t work out, or else the Turks took them, or perhaps they just got lost down the back of a drawer or something, because all of a sudden, Mrs Bramley and Elsie were
let go
, and they both kissed me the day they left, and bobbed to father, who was very stern and cold, but I could tell he was upset too. And Elsie cried, her nose as red as her hands. And the door closed on them, and Pa and I were alone.

T
HAT SEEMS A
long time ago now, and Pie and I are quite used to the silence and the shadows. We sit and read E. Nesbit, or Charles Kingsley, or Daniel Defoe (I love
Robinson Crusoe
– how splendid it would be to have an entire island to oneself!) And we explore the canal, and Port Meadow, and Binsey, and sometimes when father is in London I walk all the way to Cowley village and back, just so I can cross and recross Magdalen Bridge, and stare up at the beautiful tower. There are so many beautiful places in Oxford. If only the weather were better! And I like seeing the students in their silly mortar-boards and flapping gowns, and the dome of the Radcliffe Camera (how can a building be called a camera? – no-one has ever explained), and the Bodleian, where they have all the books in the world.

But most of the time, in winter at least, Pie and I stay close to home. Father does not like me wandering around Oxford anymore, not since I got chased down Walton Street by a crowd of the local children who threw stones at me and shouted names and I got home crying and with a lump on my head. I think I still spoke English with an accent back then, and they called me a dirty Jew and other things, but I’m not Jewish, and what if I were anyway?

Now I speak the same as everyone else, my Greekness quite gone, and I am glad and sad equally. And father hired Miss Hawcross to educate me in how to be an English girl, though I would still quite like to go to school like normal children, and perhaps once they got to know me they would not think I was just some dirty foreigner anymore. But they don’t frighten me as they once did, as I am quite tall now, and I stand my ground and clench my fists and tell them to go to the Devil, and I am very good at throwing stones and hitting what I aim at. But father does not know that of course. He says only guttersnipes call names and throw stones.