Losing Nicola (6 page)

‘Before that, I lived in London with my cousin and his wife. When his wife became pregnant, they needed the bedroom where I was sleeping.'

‘Did you escape from the Nazis?'

‘More or less.'

‘How?' Orlando was obsessed by the recent war, and had urged me to read the accounts of daring escapes from Colditz and various Stalag Lufts, the
Wooden Horse
,
The Cruel Sea
. We'd seen films starring Jack Hawkins and Richard Attenborough. We knew all about plucky Douglas Bader with his amputated legs, Wing Commander Guy Gibson,
The Naked Island
. ‘Did you dig a tunnel, or dress up in disguise?' I wanted to know all the details of fake passports and imitation uniforms, in order to carry the information back to Orlando.

He shook his head. ‘Nothing like that,' he said. ‘When my family . . . when they were . . .' His face clouded for a moment, ‘. . . my aunt Lena brought me to England, along with my cousin, just before the war had started. I was still a boy. I went to school in London, in Richmond, and all the time I studied. Then one day I saw in the paper where there was a job teaching at a school nearby this little town, and I moved down here.'

‘Lucky for me, then?'

‘Do you really think so?' He said ‘sink', instead of ‘think'.

‘Of course.' We were neglected children, but well-brought up.

‘When I came to view the room, Mrs Sheffield told me that this used to be her drawing-room, but that it was too large and too cold for her now. She said she couldn't move the piano, and she didn't want to sell it, because it belonged to her father, so whoever took the room would have to share it with the Steinway.'

‘You must have been very pleased.'

‘Pleased?' My new teacher lifted his hands in the air. ‘I could feel stars in my ears!'

‘We say “stars in our
eyes
”, not in our ears.'

‘Oh, but I felt these stars in my ears,' he said. ‘So I asked Mrs Sheffield if I might play the instrument occasionally, and she says . . .' He clasped his hands together. ‘“Oh, my dear Mr Elias, it would give me the greatest of pleasure if you would. It might need tuning, of course . . .”'

‘Did it?' I asked. He fascinated me, not simply because of the glamorous strangeness of the space he inhabited but also because of his magical ability to conjure up someone outside himself.

‘A little. I did it myself. It took me a long time, but luckily I have perfect pitch, I learned about tuning because back home in Germany, no one would come to the house to tune a piano, so my mother and I had to teach ourselves.'

I frowned. ‘Why wouldn't anyone come to your house?'

‘They were too afraid of being tainted. Or accused of collaboration.'

‘Tainted?' I stared at him in surprise. ‘Why?'

‘Because we were Jews,' he said.

It was not the first time I had heard that richly sinful, shameful word, though it was never used in my own household.
Jew
. . . Although I wasn't sure exactly of the resonances the word encompassed, I was embarrassed and ashamed, both on his behalf and on mine.

‘You won't find anything like that here,' I said in the same brisk tones that Fiona might have used, though as yet I knew nothing about anti-Semitism. ‘I hope you've found us very welcoming.'

‘Of course,' he said. ‘Before I came here, I heard very often about the snobbish English, and the way they can smell an alien or an inferior through a wall, but I have never since I got here experienced anything but kindness.'

‘Good. That's good.'

‘I admire so much these faded, war-weary women here in this little town,' he said. ‘So brave, so indomitable, hanging on, keeping their homes going, their children fed and educated and clothed. Just like mothers in Germany, I hope.'

‘Did . . . do you have a family, Mr Elias?' I asked. Beyond the thick red curtains, I could see the boys on the warm shingle, devising games to pass the time, games I'd joined in dozens of times, over many summers, which belonged to a much simpler world than the one I was hearing about now.

‘Pappi, my father, was a surgeon, my mother – Mutti – a Professor at the Conservatoire. She was from Russia, her people were high-class landowners but they had to flee from the Bolsheviks.'

I was storing these words up to ask about when I got home.
Jew. Bolshevik. Conservatoire.

‘Also,' he went on. ‘I had two little sisters, Anna and Magdalena.'

That past tense burned in my chest.
Had
. Beside his mouth, a tiny muscle jumped. I knew that if I reached out and pressed my finger to the flinching skin, I could stop it. I wanted to. I knew how his skin would feel under my touch. Beneath my Aertex shirt, my nipples softly ached.

I watched his face shut down and though I longed to know more about Mutti and Pappi and the two sisters, I kept quiet, sensing something heart-deep and wrenching in him, a loneliness, an unfulfillable yearning to belong.

I needed to change the subject. ‘May I look at the books?' I asked.

As well as the piano, Mrs Sheffield's former drawing room possessed a wall of fitted mahogany bookcases, each shelf fringed with gold-tooled leather and filled with the English classics. We had them all at home, but in much worse condition than these beautiful unused volumes of Scott, Dickens, Tolstoy, Kipling, Austen.

He nodded.

Hardly breathing, I took down a copy of
Nicholas Nickleby
and opened it very carefully. It was an India paper edition, with black-and-white etchings that were familiar from the battered copies on our own shelves. I put it back, reached first for
Emma,
and
then for my current favorite,
Northanger Abbey.
I felt an almost sensuous pleasure in touching these books, opening the covers and seeing how the pages clung one to another, each one edged with gold that glinted in the light from the big bay window.

‘Do you read a lot?' I asked.

‘I try,' he said.

‘If you want something different from these, there's a public library, here.'

‘Where is that?'

For the first time in my life, I knew how it felt to be an adult, in charge, in control. ‘I could show you if you like,' I said offhandedly, ‘one of these days.'

‘I would like very much to do that.'

‘They even have a few German books,' I said. ‘But you've probably read them all.'

‘They are still there, on the shelves?' He seemed surprised.

‘Of course. Why not?'

He looked away from me, out to sea, his voice musing. ‘I suppose I had imagined public burnings of German literature, people in coats and scarves turning up to throw their foreign books upon the pyre, hissing perhaps, hanging effigies of Goethe and Rilke, even the Brothers Grimm, fines for those who try to conceal these heretical books produced by the Enemy.'

I stared at the back of his head, not sure if he was joking. Orlando and I had grown up on Grimms' Fairy Tales. Why would anyone wish to burn them? But we also knew about brave Martin Luther burning the Papal Bull and we had just read
Fahrenheit 451
. ‘We don't do that sort of thing here,' I said.

‘I think not.' There was a droop to his shoulders that rent me. I picked up a pearl from the decorated bowl which held them. I loved the dull gleam of it lying in my palm, the hint of the life he had abandoned, a life to which he longed – or so I surmised – to return. I put it in my pocket. I started to walk over to stand by him at the window, edging round the piano, when he turned back into the room. Silhouetted against the brightness from the sea, I couldn't clearly see his features. Had he seen me? My face reddened with guilt. He would think I was a thief. What was worse, a thief who stole from someone much worse off than myself. As he bent over an open book of music, I thrust my hand into my pocket, leaned towards the fireplace and quickly pushed the pearl into one of the crevices of the carved marble surround. He looked up again just as I stepped away from the hearth. ‘Nor was it customary in Germany until recently.'

He was obviously much more closely connected with the war than I would ever be, a fact confirmed when later that evening, I overheard Ava and my mother discussing him.

‘Poor young man . . .' That was my mother. ‘According to the aunt, his entire family wiped out . . .'

‘. . . Nazis . . .' Ava's voice was hushed. ‘. . . God knows what horrors . . .'

‘. . . I shudder to think . . .'

‘. . . if it was Bella, I know how I'd . . .'

‘A refugee – what kind of a life can he have?' asked my mother. She paused. ‘The
bloody
war.'

Twice a week that summer, I walked out of our gate and down to Mrs Sheffield's house. Whenever I climbed the stairs to Mr Elias's room, I would hear him playing Schubert's
Trout Quintet
or Beethoven's
Moonlight Sonata
and for me, now, that music is inextricably associated with guilt and with him. Sometimes he would be la-la-ing along to the music and I would stand outside the door, knuckles ready to knock, listening to him, a prey to unfamiliar and exciting emotions to which I was unable at that time to give a name to.

After the lesson we often talked, standing at the window looking out at the stripes of roadway, silver bars, green grass, yellow shingle, blue-grey sea. On those baking afternoons, the sun burned the shingle white. The sea panted with heat, resting like green silk under the milky sky. Between the dusty velvet curtains, I could see the boys waiting for the moment when my hour with Mr Elias was up, ready to scoff, jealous and, at the same time, frightened, realizing that we were all growing up, recognizing that something which had until now been fixed was now in the process of changing. I often saw Orlando, too, the pale parts of his hair bleached white by salt and summer sunshine. Separated from the other boys, he would stare up at the window, frowning, and as I watched, would bend down, pick up a pebble and pulling back his arm, hurl it far out into the sea then stood with his back to the houses, watching as it hit the surface and sent up a spray of white water like an erupting volcano.

‘Look down there,' Mr Elias said one time. ‘Those are your friends. And the boy with the striped hair, what is his name?'

‘Orlando. He's terribly clever.'

‘And you, Miss Alice, are you clever?'

‘Quite clever,' I said. ‘But nothing like Orlando. He's awfully talented, too. He plays all sorts of instruments and he won a scholarship to his choir school. My mother says he's a genius. He had his IQ tested and it was something enormous. My father says he'll either end up as a Nobel prize winner or on the scaffold.'

‘This seems a strange assessment of a boy so young. Do you think your father is right?'

‘No, I don't think so,' I said. ‘At least, not the scaffold part. He'd escape somehow.'

For the sake of the poor refugee and his wiped-out family, I practised my scales over and over again. I could pick out
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
on the piano in my own house, and
Three Blind Mice
, but now I began to practise more and more assiduously. Scales . . . up, up, up, and down again. Arpeggios. Chromatic scales, octaves. I progressed from scales with one hand to scales with both, and then on to arpeggios and the ripple of chromatics. Over and over, until I could have played them in my sleep. I wanted Mr Elias's approval. I wanted to stand between his knees, feel the warmth of his breath on my neck, the beat of his heart against my spine.

As I grew more proficient, I sometimes envisaged myself seated on a stage, swaying across the ivory keys of a Steinway, the silk billows of my gown rustling, my hands flying, while an entire audience scarcely dared breathe for fear of disturbing the beauty of my playing. The Festival Hall, Sir Malcolm Sargeant, applause rippling beneath the domed roof like a swelling surging sea, cries of ‘Encore!'

One afternoon, he declared that I was to learn a simple tune played with both hands at once. ‘We shall start with a song from my own country, which you shall play first with one hand and then, when you have mastered it, with both.'

‘What's it called?'

‘
Muss i' den, muss i den, zum statle hinaus
,' he crooned into my ear. He gripped me between his knees as he put his hands over mine.

‘I know that song. My father sometimes sings it when he's shaving.'

‘Then you will like to play this, I think, Miss Alice Beecham.' His hands were warm and slightly rough. I could feel his breath on my neck, tickling the roots of my plaits. ‘
Und du, mein schatz, bleibst hier
.'

I twisted round, stared at him. We were no more than two inches apart and his face swayed towards me so that I thought, lips already wrinkling with disgust, for a moment he might kiss me. I knew about kissing: Julian had tried it once, and I had found it fairly nasty. ‘Why do you always call me Miss Alice Beecham?'

‘What should I call you?'

‘Alice, of course. That's what everyone else says.'

He smiled gravely. ‘But I am not everyone else.'

I looked at him more closely. Under a mop of wild black curls, he had light hazel eyes, surrounded by thick dark lashes and in one pupil was embedded, like a jewel, a star-shaped speck of green, the colour of a sunlit meadow, a revealing glimpse of what lay behind his eyes. Looking deep into them, and beyond, right into his head, I saw that indeed he was not like everyone else. Here was someone who was not just a man enclosed in the shell of maleness, but someone, like Orlando, whom I knew and recognized. His hand grazed one of the breasts I was beginning to develop with a shiver that touched something dark and dangerous at the base of my belly.

‘Still, I don't like being called by my full name.'

‘Very good. Then I shall call you Alice. But then you must call me Sasha.'