Kindergarten (17 page)

“Walk to the house,” she said.

His arms wrapped around himself, his body burning in the icy air, the flakes of snow like drops of fire, Hansel walked naked through the falling snow in the dark air. He saw the thick smoke pouring from the chimneys of the house.

“God, do not forsake me,” he whispered. “Let my little sister be alive. Don’t let me die.”

She took Hansel over to the oven, where the flames were now high and bright.

“Get in,” the woman said. Hansel stood for a moment, and saw his sister’s hair lying on the kitchen floor, beside her neatly folded clothes. Then, without another word, he bent over, and climbed up into the oven, and the woman shut the iron door, and fastened the bolt.

When she was sure that Hansel was dead also, the woman went back out of the house, and to the stable. She closed the door of the iron cage, and picked up Hansel’s clothes, then walked back to the house, closing the stable door behind her. The whole clearing around the house was white and trackless as the snow continued to fall.

Inside the house, she picked up Gretel’s clothes and hair, and added the children’s clothes to all the others in the room in the corridor. She put Gretel’s chain and Hansel’s ring in the room with all the other jewellery, and then walked back into the kitchen, and towards the oven, drooling with anticipation. Today was going to be a feast day.

She is living there still, happy and contented, living in perfect comfort and prosperity, waiting for the children who come through the forest.

H
E TURNED
at the top of the steps and stood looking back the way he had come, towards the Ferry House, out into the darkness of the playing-fields, from the terrace that ran along the back of the school buildings, above flood-level. As he looked, for a long time, out across the low-lying fields towards Dunwich, down the coast, he felt, in the darkness and cold air, as if he were at the edge of the earth, facing out across the unknown, at unmapped and desolate regions stretching endlessly away, the sound of the sea on his left. He had felt the same feeling when he was little, when he stood outside the front of the Ferry House, beyond the school grounds, and looked across the common, rising beyond the footpath, filling all the distance to the sky. It had seemed to him like the beginnings of the outside world, a mysterious and untracked wilderness where the sun went down and strange creatures lurked in the bushes and long grass.

He turned and walked towards the school, the unlighted mass of the buildings a darker solid shape against the sky. He was not a boarder in the school, and only saw the dormitories during the holidays. In his imagination, they were always empty and echoing, the beds stripped, the walls bare.

Instead of walking along the terrace to make his way out on to Dunwich Green, near Tennyson’s, he went inside, switching his torch on as he opened the nearest door, and began to walk parallel to the terrace, through the centre of the buildings. The reflection of his own light moved towards him, caught in the glass of class-room doors. In the school theatre the set was still up for
The Winter’s Tale
, the tall leafless tree in the centre, its branches spreading over the bare stage, and there was one of the programmes designed for them by Lilli still lying on the floor, a dusty footprint across its front cover.

His feet echoing, he passed empty class-rooms, with writing still on the blackboards, possessions stacked neatly in the lockers, all the children gone. The room he eventually went into was the German room, where he had hardly ever been before, as he did not take German. He switched on the light and sat at a desk near the door, at the back of the room.

Above the blackboard were tables of the definite and indefinite articles, irregular verbs, personal pronouns. Lotte Goetzel’s father had written that Lotte felt very strange when she had heard English parents calling their children “you,” because she thought that was really a plural pronoun, and it sounded so formal and distant. The days of the week, and the months of the year, written in German, which lined the walls near the ceiling, reminded him of the letters of the alphabet which ran around the walls in his infants’ school, when there had been so much to learn, so many tasks to master, in order to become grown-up, a big boy: weeing like a big boy, and climbing stairs properly, having a proper big boy’s bed, tying a tie, fastening shoe-laces. Every child, through all the years of childhood, worked with great intentness to acquire the skills of a proper adult person.

On the blackboard was a partially erased drawing of a human figure, a clownish matchstick giant drawn by a small child, the parts of the body carefully labelled:
das Auge, der Mund, das Ohr, die Nase
; and he saw that every object in the room had a neat little label on it, naming what it was, as if giving that object reality, like pages in an illustrated A.B.C.—
der Stuhl, der Tisch, die Decke, die T)r, dar Fenster
. When he had been teaching Lilli, over a year ago, he had drawn blank maps of parts of Southwold, and simplified sketch outlines of some of her illustrations, asking her to write in the names of as many of the buildings or objects as she could. He remembered her clutching her pencil fiercely, her eyes determined.

The vocabulary list pinned to the wall beside the blackboard was for
die Stadt: the town
, and the first words in the list which followed—
die Hauptstrasse: the main street, die Strasse: the street, die Gasse: the lane
—reminded him of the nursery rhyme on one of the birthday cards from Jo.
(This is the key of the kingdom: In that kingdom is a city, In that city is a town, In that town there is a street, In that street there winds a lane…)

Jo had bought two cards for him, one for a ten-year-old and one for a six-year-old, and he had found them suspended from the ceiling above his bed when he had woken up that morning, together with a poster —“
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BIG 16-YEAR-OLD-TYPE CORRIE
”—that he had drawn using his set of Winsor & Newton coloured inks that had been one of Lilli’s Christmas presents to him. He loved the decorative boxes that the bottles of ink came in. The one he liked best was the design for ultramarine ink, where a little boy in a sailor suit knelt on a rock at the edge of the sea, sailing a model yacht. It was like the design on the painted enamel egg in the kitchen. Each of the cards had Jo’s signature inside, and a pencilled scrawl that was Matthias’s signature when Jo held his hand. All that it said inside the card for the ten-year-old was
I can do anything, now that I’m ten
. A lot of people had sent him cards, and there had been two greetings telegrams, one from Dad—“
SIXTEEN! DON’T BULLY YOUR FRAIL OLD DAD. MISSING YOU, SON
”—and one from Cato—“
CONGRATULATIONS ON SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY. PLAIN BROWN PACKAGE FOLLOWS.
” He remembered how much he had looked forward to his tenth birthday because his age would be in double figures.

As a small child, he hated having his birthday so close to Christmas. It seemed so unfair to have two such special days so close together, reducing the time he could spend on speculation and building up excitement, though his parents had always been meticulous in keeping the two occasions separate, giving his birthday an importance not overshadowed by Christmas. He remembered asking his mother why she hadn’t chosen him on a better day. He had hankered after the twenty-eighth of October at one time, as something to look forward to in the middle of the longest term of the school year. Birthdays belonged to dark nights and cold weather: the games inside could be more exciting then, he had thought.

W
HEN
he walked through into the sun lounge from Lilli’s kitchen, she was on the far side, bent over her loom. He had heard the click-click as he approached.

She moved along the bench as he came in, and he sat beside her.

They sat in silence together as they often did for a while before he went to bed. He leaned forward, watching the pattern emerge, thread by thread. He looked carefully at the design of the shawl she was making. Lilli’s hands moved smoothly backwards and forwards, up and down, the hand nearest to him passing the shuttle swiftly away from him.

As he had requested, there had been no formal celebration for his birthday: Lilli baked a cake, Sal came round, there had been presents, but that was all. He would open his presents at supper-time, the last thing before he went to bed. It was a tradition he had started when he was little, to keep his birthday presents as far away as possible from his Christmas presents. After Matthias had gone to bed, they had played Dungeons and Dragons for a time, though Sal left before the game was completed.

“Twenty questions,” Corrie said.

“‘Try to speak. Try to answer without writing anything down,’” Lilli quoted to him.

“What is your name?”

“What is the name of my school?”

“What is the weather like today?”

“What season is it?”

“How old am I? “

“What part did Jo play in
The Winter’s Tale
?”

“Which room are we in?”

“Don’t ask me what your father’s job is, will you?” Lilli asked eventually, when the questions started to become more and more bizarre.

He had been reminding Lilli of some of his early lessons with her, when he had completed his hour by firing twenty questions, trying to get her to answer automatically without the agonies of thought, insisting on complete sentences. He used to hold on gently to her hands, not allowing her to move them, so that she could make no gesture, no movement to convey words she could not utter or recall. She had been unable to think of the word for “headmaster,” and although he had included the same question over and over again, she could summon up no other word for Dad’s job than “big teacher” for several weeks.

“You were a very hard teacher,” Lilli said, smiling

“Inevitably, with such a troublesome pupil.” Corrie assumed his most schoolmasterly voice. “I had to complain to the big teacher.”

He remembered how, in his early lessons, he was selfconscious, not fully at ease, and sometimes found it difficult to talk beyond the words he had prepared for the lessons with her. He used an awkward jocularity, copied from some of his teachers, who were unsure of how to communicate with him. Now he was the teacher, and all his experience up to that time had been of being taught.

They sat together in silence again.

He remembered how the skin of Lilli’s hands felt loose, as if flesh and bone beneath were too small for it, like something soft and yielding to lie against if you were tired.

“You look very thoughtful,” Lilli said, some time later.

It was the usual invitation to talk.

“Not really.”

“Yes, really. You’ve been the same all week, Corrie. Worried about the onset of old age?”

“It’s just some music I’m trying to…”

“Yes. You have been practising a lot recently.”

There was a faintly interrogative note in Lilli’s comment.

He couldn’t tell Lilli what his main thoughts were about, that inner room in the bedroom, that entry into the forest, pathless, grassless, black as perpetual night within a few feet of the edge.

“Jo’s very unhappy at the moment, Corrie. I think he’s been lonely, and wanting to talk to you. He says you’ve been locking yourself in the Ferry House, and staying there all day.” Lilli paused. “And he hasn’t heard any music from inside.”

“I’ve been thinking.”

“He was crying last night. It’s the end of the year. The time when you look back.”

“Mum?”

“Yes.”

“He was very quiet when Sal was here.”

Corrie thought for a moment.

“You’re right about the end of the year. I don’t feel that time has passed just because I’ve had my birthday today, but on New Year’s Eve I’ll be thinking of a whole year that’s gone.”

“He’s missing her very badly just now. Christmas, and your father being away.”

“Jo put his present in the middle of his room, so it’ll be the first thing he sees when he gets back.”

They had bought Dad a piece of Staffordshire pottery when Sal had taken them into Norwich, a ship called
The Three Brothers
.

“He’s been upset about that school, and the terrorists as well.”

That afternoon, the terrorists had set a deadline. They were going to shoot one child every half-hour, beginning at ten-fifteen, English time, that evening, and continue until they got what they wanted. Lilli had listened to the radio with the two of them to the serious, impassioned voices speaking in German, and then the reporter in Berlin translating what was being said, the telephone line crackling, breathing and heartbeats magnified by the recording. The news-reader’s calm, steady voice mentioned that there was some movement of army units in the area around the school, and then went on to other items of news: the murder of a kidnap victim in Turin, an explosion in a Paris shopping-centre, the trial of an Arab gunman in London. Corrie thought of the young woman reading the evening news on the television, carefully made-up, cool, distant, like the voice of a teacher in a lecture theatre—a remote figure—speaking unemotionally of the events of an equally remote past.

“It’s a quarter to ten. Let’s have supper soon.”

“I’ll go and get Jo.”

“Will you talk to him, Corrie? Brothers should help each other.”

He nodded.

T
HERE
seemed to be no one in Tennyson’s when he walked through. Baskerville stood up as he went into their part of the sun lounge, to investigate who was there, peering closely at him before he went back to his basket, wagging his tail and looking vaguely gratified after Corrie scratched his head for him.

As he drew the curtains, he looked out across the Green. The lights around the horse-chestnut tree were switched on, swaying in the wind. Two boys were riding bicycles round the tree, their backs to their handlebars, facing out across the saddles, moving their feet round and round backwards, skidding on the wet grass.

He picked up a book lying on the back of the chesterfield and began to look at the illustrations. He could hear music from Jo’s bedroom upstairs. Pooh and Piglet walked through the snow together. Pooh and Tigger sat at a table eating honey. Piglet planted a haycorn. Eeyore, with immense dignity, floated out from under the bridge during the game of Poohsticks. Jo had once written an essay in which he had called Eeyore his favourite character in fiction.