A Parachute in the Lime Tree (7 page)

‘Were you one of the ones who bombed Belfast?’ she asked. Maybe that was a bit blunt but she had to know.

‘I was a lamplighter.’

That sounded a nice thing to be but she knew it couldn’t be nice at all. She assumed she should know what that was, so she didn’t ask any more.

‘I will leave soon. As soon as my leg is strong enough, I will go.’

‘If you’re gone when I see you next,’ she said, ‘I’ll say nothing.’

When she went back to the house, she couldn’t settle to anything. There was the baking to do and the pantry to be done over and the boys’ beds to be stripped. Instead, she went up to Mother’s dressing table and took out the manicure set with all the sharp little instruments with their pearly handles. She prised out specks of dirt from under her nails, soaked, clipped, filed and buffed them. All the time, she could see his tired face with the blue, blue eyes. She wished there was something she wanted enough to jump out of a plane for it.

She still talked to Father sometimes and she knew he wouldn’t like what she’d done to his atlas. No one ever came to his shed uninvited either, but maybe he would like that a traveller was in there. He would be curious, of that she was sure. He was always far more interested in what was happening on the other side of the world than in what went on in Dunkerin. Mother always told him that to succeed in a country practice, you needed to join this and that, pay heed to give a little bit of business to this grocer, a bit to that draper. Father did none of that. He pretended not the slightest interest in either golf or bridge. There were those, of course, who said Dr Hennessy couldn’t give a hoot about anything; spent all his day
doodling on maps in his consulting room while the queue of patients got longer and more restless. He never bothered about the order of arrivals, either. He would come out and scan the grey faces in the room and form a snap judgement as to who was most in need.

‘Every doctor needs a diversion,’ Father used to say. His own passion was St Brendan and his voyages. ‘First to reach America, not that the rest of the bloody world will give him the credit for it.’ All summer long, he’d be at his experiments. He spent months soaking scraps of leather in the old bath he filled with seawater, each one coated in a different substance from the pots he kept in his shed to see which one provided most protection from the brine. He tried tallow, beeswax, cod oil, lanolin, and God knows what else. Finally, he came down in favour of one, though she couldn’t remember now which one it was. He had Sean Galligan dig and line a trench that ran all the way down from the henhouse to the gooseberry bushes, which he filled with seawater from Dunkerin Bay. Then, he built himself a model curragh – gunwhale to keel about three feet long – covered it in stretched oxhide, treated it, and set it afloat.

She went to put away the atlas she had defiled earlier. On the map of Europe were hundreds of pinpricks where Father had stuck little flags in different colours, trying to predict where the Germans would go next. She ran her fingers over the pitted surface of Poland and the Low Countries. He was dead before they reached France.

When she went to bring the airman some food, she warned him about the lads.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said.

‘It’s not me who needs to be worrying.’

He smiled, and suddenly it seemed the right response.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked. He said it back to himself a few times, flicking her name on the tip of his tongue like he was calling the cat. ‘Well, Kitty, I might need to be here for a
couple of days. After a couple of days they will forget about me and my knee will be stronger.’

She wondered how she could have lost control of things so quickly. She had enjoyed being the ministering angel but he didn’t seem to need any of that now.

‘The boys go back to Dublin today,’ she said. ‘The two fellows who scared the living daylights out of you last night.’ It gave her some satisfaction to put him back in his place. Before she closed the door, he called after her. ‘My name is Oskar Müller.’

She continued to pull the door to, as though she hadn’t heard him, but all the way back to the house she was thinking to herself what a lovely name it was, and how she’d never heard of anyone else called that, except for Oscar Wilde.

Elsa played Scarlatti. Next door, the windows were flung open, even though it was already September. If Oskar had returned for the holiday, he would hear her play. She would make him hear. Now and then, she wandered over to the window to look for him in the Müller garden.

Frau Müller sat there, as she always did on sunny mornings, her back to the Frankel house, her tea tray arranged as meticulously as the hair that shimmered at her neck. Once, they would take tea together in the garden, Mama and Frau Müller. Once, Oskar would paint with Papa, learning to be bold. They had mingled their blood, Elsa and Oskar, down in the shadiest part of the woods. Oskar couldn’t bring himself to cut her, so in the end she’d had to do it herself. They held up their index fingers and closed their eyes and promised each other an ever after. Now, a glassy membrane had settled between their houses. Whilst the Müllers lived in the air, amongst flowers, the Frankels dwelt behind shutters.

For all that, I am still Elsa, she thought. It’s not such a great adventure, surely, even today, to run an errand in my own city. To fold back the shutters for once. No one met her eye as she turned the corner of Adlerstrasse. That was good, she thought. No one held his nose as she passed, either. She might, if all was well, make it to Herr Goldmann’s shop without catching a spray of spittle on her sleeve.

The blinds were down when she got there, the awning in and the door pulled to. No broken windows, though. Nothing daubed on the front. That was also good, she thought. But no sign of life either. She was about to give up when she heard the creak of a sash somewhere above her head. Inside, the shop
smelt of dead things. He stood there, Herr Goldmann, his hands at his sides, palms cast downwards. He said nothing. Not a word. To break the silence and because she was, after all, still Elsa, she elaborated on the adventure, such as it was.

‘Some cotton, brown. For stockings. I’m always needing to darn my stockings. Sharp bones like all the Frankels. Aunt Frieda was forever putting her elbows through her cardigans.’

He shook his head and drew in a long wavering breath that seemed to steal something from the room. At the counter, he tugged at a narrow drawer that released itself in a rattle of spools.

Elsa trailed her fingers along the carefully graded colours until she lit on just the right shade of brown. Why not have purple, she thought suddenly, or yellow for that matter? Why pretend anymore that a brown stocking need remain brown when everything else has changed? She gathered up two handfuls of spools, bright as bridesmaids’ posies, and shoved them deep into her pockets. Herr Goldmann pushed away the few coins she gave him and asked instead that she bring him some bread, perhaps an egg or two if they had some. She babbled on as prettily as a Scarlatti sonata. ‘And jam. I’ll bring you jam. Mama still makes some from the berries in the garden.’

‘And jam, then,’ he said.

Outside, the sun still shone and the city gleamed and the crimson folds cascading from the buildings were almost beautiful. Even so, she hurried her step. Best get home before they welcome their little leader, before they grow glassy-eyed. She fixed her thoughts on the colours with which she would embroider her knees when all the stockings had worn through. That afternoon, she would scatter Scarlatti into the air in the house where no one said much anymore, where Papa sat motionless at his desk with papers strewn around him, as though the changes hadn’t happened, as though he was still the Professor.

Elsa could hardly remember the days when he was self-assured and surrounded by friends. Nowadays, he wasn’t even permitted to paint.

‘Degenerate,’ they said, ‘that art of yours.’ So Papa’s life’s work was dismissed at a click of the Direktor’s fingers. They stuck him at the back of some office where he didn’t officially exist and paid him enough to feed the cat.

Elsa turned the corner of Schillerstrasse, where all the flower boxes were red and white. Geraniums. Just red and white. She wondered when they would cultivate a black one to celebrate all that they had ruined. The sun was in her eyes now and for a moment she felt less sure of her way. The crowds out early on the streets today seemed to blur the city’s contours.

She almost collided with a man standing in the centre of the pavement, watching his little dog relieve itself against a tree. She kept her eyes down, her fingers rumbling through the spools of thread in her pockets, her shoulders braced away from him. His voice came out of the haze of sunshine high above her,

‘Ah, but if it isn’t little Miss Frankel.’

She squinted but even as his face took shape, she didn’t recognise him. Once upon a time it wouldn’t have mattered that the Professor had to introduce himself. After all, she’d only met him a couple of times, when he was a junior lecturer in Papa’s faculty and she was young enough to be tweaked under the chin. Nowadays, though, Papa talked constantly of the Professor. For Papa, he was a giant; a man who held the power to crush them all but who had decided instead to show kindness.

Elsa shielded her eyes against the sun as she felt the little dog weave its way around her ankles. He asked about her music, did she still play? And her Mutti, how was she these days? When the questions came to an end, she left a respectful gap, then wished him a good day, such as it was.

‘What a fine man your father is,’ he said then. She smiled, tried to make herself pleasant. ‘People complain so. I mean,
I don’t blame the man. He wasn’t educated to be a clerk.’ He gave a dry little laugh and wiped his lips with a crumpled handkerchief. ‘Come and take coffee with me,’ he said. ‘Such a glorious morning to talk of dear old Papa.’

She didn’t drink coffee, so perhaps that was why she hesitated, or maybe it was the gaggle of Austrians in national dress, with their sharp accents, who came a little too close.

‘Your father would want you to help him, Fraulein.’ He pronounced the word elaborately, extravagantly. It gave her hope and so she went with him. The Professor strode on in front of her, his little dog leading the way, the lead pulled taut.

As she walked, she began to feel a little brighter. Perhaps the Professor had more interesting work for Papa. Some research, perhaps. Anything other than bookkeeping. Then, when they had passed two cafés, she began to wonder why neither would do. He turned around as though he had read her mind but perhaps also to make sure she was still there. ‘My rooms are on Genferplatz,’ he said.

The Professor stood back and let her climb the narrow staircase ahead of him. As she walked slowly up the stairs, she heard the little dog scramble through a doorway and out the back. The building was hushed, confident. It was the silence of those who speak only when they wish. She would have liked the little dog to stay.

Papa always said it was the key to a man, what he chose to display of himself on his walls. She was astonished by the Professor’s walls. They were covered in watery sunsets and bowls of fruit that had never seen a tree. It made her feel at once superior and puzzled that a Professor of Fine Art at the university could have such cautious, uneducated tastes.

He entered the room behind her. As he clicked the door shut, she heard him turn the key. There was no more talk of coffee. He pointed at the couch and indicated where she was to sit. He pulled over a chair that scraped on the polished floor.
He sat opposite her – too close – his legs almost touching hers. For the first time, she had a chance to evaluate further this Professor. She spotted the pin in his lapel. That was only to be expected, she supposed, but all the same it struck her that she’d never before been alone with a man who wore such a pin. She drew her legs in closer. She noted the long creases that joined nose to mouth, the faint milky blue of his eyes.

When she opened her mouth to babble as she always did when others were silent, he raised his hand sharply and a wisp of air passed across her face like the ghost of a blow. She flinched, then ran her fingers across the spools in her pocket, playing them like semiquavers. He could speak first if it mattered that much to him. She understood that, above all else, she must be humble, grateful for whatever he might offer. He was so close she could smell cake on his breath, sweet cream and coffee. Wary now, she covered her knees with her skirt, pulling it tightly, wrapping it under her thighs.

He cleared his throat, lowered his hand as though about to touch her, then drew it back again. Whether his disgust was at himself or at her, she couldn’t tell. A filmy moisture had settled on his upper lip and she had already half risen from the couch when he struck her in the face, hard and sharp. The force jerked her head to one side, forced her back onto the couch. Tears sprang to her eyes with the pain and shock of it. Still, he said nothing. When her eyes cleared, he was sitting in the same position, examining his raised hand as if it was something quite separate from the rest of him. As she scrambled up to make for the door, drawing her coat tight around her, he moved quicker still.

‘Sit,’ he said, as if she were the little dog downstairs. He held her chin tight between index finger and thumb; examined one side of her face then the other. When he started to speak, it was as though he was talking to himself. That was what frightened her most. She tried to shake off his grip but he held her firm. ‘He was the devil’s own twin when he was in my shoes.
Pull your socks up, Weber. Most irregular, Weber. Most inaccurate. Most out of order. He loved to lord it over me, your old Papa. Even now he forgets himself sometimes. Can you believe that? Even now.’

She wanted to cry but she wouldn’t. Wouldn’t cry for him.

‘You want to know why he’s still there, incompetent, pathetic, bumbling over those figures?’ She turned away from him, biting her lip. ‘Because it gives me pleasure. That’s why. Because he is learning humility.’