Snowleg (5 page)

He walked at his special lilting pace for two hours along a narrow path overgrown with ferns. After another hour he worried he had taken a wrong turning or was walking too slowly. The sun set and he panicked. In the night there were Russian soldiers on patrol with orders to shoot. He walked on in the dark and 40 minutes later arrived at the edge of a town. He saw a billboard advertising Juno cigarettes and knew that if the wording on the cigarette packet read “Juno – long and round”, then he had left the GDR, and if the words read “Juno – thick and round”, then he had not. He walked impatiently towards the billboard.

“I was so full of hope and happiness. I thought, now it's Go. I was free, I told myself.”

He read the words “Juno – thick and round” and exclaimed something out loud. He never knew what, but a woman was passing who heard him. Within a short time he was stopped and taken to a small room next to the police station and charged with slander against the state. It was the time of Ulbricht's paranoia. The mildest objection was a pretext for imprisonment.

“The accused delivered the remark in such a manner as to mock the noble aims of the revolution,” declared the prosecuting judge. When his name was discovered on a list of members belonging to the banned Social Democratic Party his sentence was increased to five years.

That was 18 months ago. He had been a prisoner ever since.

“It seems anyone who lives here has to fool themselves in everything they do.” She picked up the orange he had stitched back together with blue cotton. Pressed it to her nose. Smelled it.

He scratched his cheek with the back of his thumb. He hadn't shaved and his thumb made a rasping sound. “Come here.”

She put down the orange and walked towards him, stopping a foot from his chair. He looked into her eyes and without taking his eyes from her face he lightly sawed his hand between her legs. He removed his hand. Looked at it. Began to lift it to his nose. “I'd better leave.”

She moved behind him and touched his neck. He did nothing for a while, feeling the pressure of her fingers. Then his hand reached slowly up and clasped hers and their fingers intertwined.

He stayed that night and in the morning they came for him.

She was standing in the front room without her shoes on. “La-la-la,” she hummed. “La-la-la.”

He looked at her, then back at her book.

“La-la-la.”

He tried not to look up this time. She saw him blush.

“La-la-la.” She was singing now.

He looked up. Half smiled. Shook his head to himself.

“La-la-la.”

“What are you thinking about?”

The door burst open. Out on the street the boy with stuck-out ears was laughing.

CHAPTER THREE

Q
UICKLY, NOT LOOKING AT
Peter, his mother finished. “They bundled me out of the country. I stayed with friends in London – I couldn't face going back to Lancashire. When I found out I was pregnant with you, I wrote to say I wouldn't be coming home. You were born the following summer. I met Daddy at a firework party in Notting Hill. We were married by Christmas.”

Three pigeons flapped from the verge. Peter watched them fly off, feeling a chill in the back of his arms and in his kidneys.

“You'll get to my age,” she said, rotating the watch like an amulet, “and you'll learn there are things you cannot speak about right away. They need to be salted and packed in ice.”

Still she avoided his eyes. “The awful thing is, I've never been able to discover what did happen to your father. If the West Germans paid for his freedom or if he's still in prison or if he died. Believe me, I tried. I wrote to the prison authorities in Dorna, Bautzen, Rottstockbei, Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Bützow, Ludwigslust, Waldheim, Torgau . . .” The recital had the desperation of her piano-playing. “But without a name – hopeless. And then the Wall went up. Not that that stopped me. Joachim, my music teacher, made persistent enquiries through his contacts in the Party. As did the Foreign Office. Nothing. Not a lead. I tell you, when your father was dragged out of that door, he vanished. But I doubt a single hour passes when I'm not aware of his face looking back at me.”

She started to undo the watch-strap. “I remember every useless thing he said. But I never knew what he was called apart from Peter or where he came from – or if he told me I can't remember. All I have of your father is this.”

In a daze he put on the watch. Only now was she able to look at him through eyes she might have been rubbing. “You can make a life in a night, but that doesn't mean –”

“Oh, Mum,” and put his hand on her shoulder.

“It's all right,” she murmured in a low pressed voice, as if he was a child again. “I don't have a photo, but you are very like him.”

“How?”

“Your eyes, darling. And the corner of your mouth goes down just like his.”

He felt her chin on his head. Looking down towards the radio mast in Sutton Mandeville. Her arms wrapping him. Endeavouring to keep something from falling apart. “I always thought that if he could, he would have got here. Absolutely, he would have got here. But how was he going to find me? He never knew I was pregnant.”

“Daddy knows all this?”

“Yes. If your father . . . if Rodney had had his way I would have told you many years ago, but – I'm going to start crying here – knowing how much he loved you I couldn't bring myself to because he
is
your father and he will always be your father, and I think you'll have to accept that this day is sadder for him than it is for you.”

This was too much for Peter. He burst into inconsolable tears. He didn't work out then, not immediately, how much grief it had cost her, how much anguish she and Rodney had been through on the road to deciding when to tell him; nor that he was weeping not least because nothing had changed with his mother.

How long they sat in their peculiar embrace, he didn't know. At some point, his mother stirred and when she spoke again he was reminded of how much he had inherited from her. Including a very English ability to tidy away. “You know, I think Rodney's right,” slapping the grass off her damp yellow dress. “It's not going to rain any more.”

He felt strangely suspended as he followed her back through blackberry bushes on which spiders had left their webs and towards the group sitting under the chestnut tree. In the far corner of the lawn, the sun shone on a straw hat.

“I suppose Grandpa knows all about it?”

“Your grandfather's been an infernal pest all these years. It's been very difficult –”

“Peter!” Rosalind's voice floated to him. She was on her feet, hurtling over the grass. “Grandpa's told me!” and threw her arms around his neck.

His mother glared at the old man sitting cross-legged on the beach mat. “Dad, what in God's name have you done?”

Weathered and grey like a cemetery angel, he looked up. There was a brief benign smile. “Peter.”

“How are you, Grandpa?” and kissed him on his flaky cheeks.

“Well? Well? Well? Has she told you or hasn't she?” His questions smelled of beer.

“Do shut up,” said Rodney, and to his wife, “I'm sorry, but there's a limit.”

The air was livid with his mother's concern. “You told Ros? How could you?”

“Of course I told her,” the old man grizzled in a voice slow but lucid. “Just like you should have told the boy years ago. He was perfectly capable of dealing with it at twelve. Don't know why you had to wait until his sixteenth birthday. Anyway, where's the cake? Rodney, get the cake.”

“For once in your life, father-in-law, will you piss off. Just this once.” His neck was inflamed and he was trembling.

“Easy for you to say piss off,” staring at Rodney in a baleful way. “Didn't fight the buggers. In battle. Bastards. Not like us.”

He removed his panama, with its regimental hatband the colour of purple carbon, and fanned his face with it. Everyone knew what Milo Potter thought of the Germans. As an army doctor, he had fought against them in Egypt. Seen them blow up monasteries in Italy. Lost friends to them in the North Atlantic. The war continued to upset him.

“Dad, you're a tiresome old baggage,” said his daughter, distressed. “That's the past. We're moving forward now.” She was trying not to cry and her face looked twisted with the effort. “Stay here,” to Peter, “I'm going to fetch your present.”

Moments later a golden retriever puppy ran across the lawn.

“She's called Honey,” said the woman who had orphaned him. Her eyes, still red, fastened on him and waited for his reaction, smiling gamefully.

He looked at the puppy. Went inside.

Twenty minutes later, Rosalind came into his room and found him sitting at the window, a book open on his lap.

“Tea's ready.”

“I'll come in a moment.”

“Does that mean no Scrabble?”

“What? No.” Then: “Just set it up. I'll be right down.”

She wanted to say something. “It's brilliant!”

“What is?”

“Your being German,” almost proudly, staring as though at a steaming dish of lamb shanks.

He threw down the Malory. “It's not brilliant. It's not riveting. It's not even interesting. It's absurd. Everyone hates the Germans and so do I. So do you.”

Rosalind hadn't seen him crying since they were small children. She stared at him with eyes wide open and ran from the room. Only then did he look into the mirror, and look away.

Outside on the lawn the palaver of tea. Of his stepfather's distress. Of a cake sunk in the middle. His mother had forgotten to remove it from the oven and the disreputable heap lay on a green Tupperware plate, the 16 unlit candles like a bed of nails.

“I still say you shouldn't have gone to Leipzig,” his grandfather said crossly – and Peter understood Milo Potter's lapsed attention towards his daughter, his grudging acceptance of her baskets of washed laundry, of the meals she brought to his spartan flat above the shoe-shop in Tisbury. The more she did for him the more he looked west, to Canada, where his two youngest daughters lived somewhere on the prairie. Viola and Ruth only came home for the big events, but he talked about them in a different voice. A voice in which his Lancashire accent all but disappeared. They wouldn't have gone singing in Germany.

She drew up her knees under her and started to saw. “Here, Dad,” she sighed. “Sink your teeth into this.”

“What about the candles? He needs to blow out the candles.”

“Don't worry about the candles,” mumbled Peter. He caught a whiff of Rodney's Patum Peperium. Already it smelled oddly different.

“Then give that slice to the boy. It's his birthday.”

A quarter of a century later, Peter could still taste it. The mess of dense banana-flavoured sponge and the dreaded fizz of baking powder.

Towards the end of the afternoon, Peter went into Rodney's studio. The kind, jolly man he had, until now, called “Daddy” sat at a slanted desk making sketches for a wedding invitation.

Rodney didn't glance up. He leaned over his drawing board and rubbed out a pencil outline calmly, with no excitement, the way Peter had seen a fisherman on the Yorkshire coast scrape the bottom of his boat. A vicar's son from Tansley, Rodney had escaped the Church to study art at Camberwell, but he struggled after college to live off his paintings.

“Say what you like,” he said, speaking to the cherub, “I always thought of you as my son. I always will.”

“You'll always be Daddy,” Peter said uselessly. “Always.”

“Your mother never told me who he was, nor did I ask. I adored her. Still do.” He examined the edge of his eraser with a fierce look. “But I can tell you the moment when I fell for you.” At a bonfire party in Elgin Crescent, the same evening that he met Peter's mother. “She was holding this dark-haired baby and both of you were watching the flames. You stretched out your hand to me and kept on stretching it out. That's when I had the feeling you could be my child.”

“I am your child, Dad,” and cast his eyes at what, until this afternoon, had been more fixed than any compass point. The maple-framed watercolour of a Derbyshire vicarage. The lime-washed floors. The tray of nibs that always had seemed an extension of his father.

“Just remember you are exactly who you want to be at any moment of any day – you have the opportunity. Remember that.”

“I will, Dad.”

At last it was time to go to the station. His mother insisted on driving.

Rodney tapped on the window for him to wind it down. “If you want me to, of course I'll play in the Fathers' Match.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Darling, will you tell Rosalind we had to leave?” called his mother across his lap.

“Bye, Peter,” bending down, his voice infallibly gentle. Behind, the blue ropes of a motionless swing.

“Bye, Dad.”

“See you in 20 minutes,” said his mother.

The car filled with her perfume as they drove towards Tisbury, filling the silence until she could bear it no more and started to lament the fact that her father had become senile. “It's a pity you didn't know him when he was practising.”

Two days later, there was a note from Rosalind to say that she had waited for him. She had laid the whole game out, prepared the score sheet. “But when I came to look for you, you were gone.”

CHAPTER FOUR

I
T SHOCKED
P
ETER TO
return to St Cross. His mother's revelation had removed him to a ridge a continent away from his previous life. As he walked from the station past Southgate Cinema, he noticed a poster for
Where Eagles Dare
and caught his breath. Richard Burton in Nazi uniform.