Somewhere Over England (3 page)

When his footsteps could no longer be heard her mother turned slowly to Helen, her lips thin.

‘How could you do this to me? After all your poor father’s suffering you expect me to accept a German into my life, into the Avenue.’

There was no steam coming from the pot now, or was it just that Helen could not see it in the fading light, for the sun seemed to have vanished. There was no gleam to the silver, just this hard lump in her throat which obstructed her breathing, her vision, her words. She clenched her jaw, pushing away the plate with the meringue as far as she could reach.

‘Mother, I love Heine. Even if he were English you would not be pleased. You would not let me go. I know you are using his nationality as a reason to stop my marriage. You can come
and stay often. We are not too far away. He is of the right sort of family to please you. Mother, I love him.’

She could feel her throat thickening, aching, and knew that tears were near but she must not cry. There was no time in her life for tears, she had told herself that years ago.

‘You love him more than your own mother?’ Lydia’s voice was harsh, her hand had bunched into a fist.

Helen sat back. She picked up the crumbs around her plate, one by one, placing them in a neat pile along the blue painted edge then she looked up at her mother. The ache in her throat was gone and there was a coldness in its place, a strength, and she spoke clearly as she picked up the plates, laying the knives side by side, neatly, quietly.

‘I love Heine as a woman loves a man. You must let me go, Mother.’

‘You are disgusting.’ Her mother was shouting now, opening her hand and striking the table. ‘He is so old. You are only eighteen. The neighbours, what will they say when they know he is a German? Mrs Jones lost Albert, Mrs Sinclair her husband.’

Helen stood up now, standing above her mother, realising that she was taller than the other woman. ‘Tell them he is Dutch.’

She wanted to strike her mother for daring to use the grief of her friends to hurt her daughter. The grief of Mrs Jones who had once been plump, of Mrs Sinclair whose eyes were deep set now when they had not been before.

‘Tell them he is Dutch,’ she repeated, suddenly tired. ‘I shall come and see you often, you must come and see us but I shall marry him, and I shall do so in the autumn.’

Her mother spoke again. ‘But…’

‘Mother, I will marry him, even if I have to become pregnant in order to force you to agree. It is your decision.’ Helen’s mouth was hard and set. Heine would not marry without her mother’s consent and she had spent too many years waiting to be loved, waiting to be free. She would say and do whatever was necessary.

Heine stood beyond the patio, on the grass. It eased his leg to stand on something which accommodated the difference in length between the right and left, slight though it was. He drew
on his cigarette before holding it away, watching the ash as it fell. He could feel and taste a shred of tobacco between his lips. He removed it with his thumb and forefinger.

He looked at the forsythia which grew up against the wooden fence surrounding the garden and at the two apple trees near to the gate which led out across the field. Had Helen walked through that with her father, he wondered.

It seemed strange that there were no lime trees as there were in his garden. He corrected himself – in his parents’ garden. Momentarily he could smell their scent. He drew on his cigarette again and the memory dissipated but at least it had existed and he felt warmed. For the first time for what seemed like years he had found his way back beyond the darkness.

He turned and looked back at the house. A dog barked somewhere in the neighbourhood. The tea had been difficult. Helen should have told her mother, it was not correct to approach their marriage in this way and fear rose in him that he would lose her, this girl who pushed shadows away. Should he go back in? But no, it was for the mother and daughter to decide, as he and his mother had decided.

Yes, you must leave Germany, she had said, her face pinched and anxious, her voice low as they sat before the tiled stove. You must leave for the sake of harmony in this house. Your father is a good man. You are also good, but impulsive. He will not change and you will make his position awkward. We love you, Heine, but you must leave.

Heine walked across the lawn, across the path to the forsythia. He threw his cigarette in an arc on to the damp earth to one side and bent to the shrub. There was no scent.

He had left Germany.

He turned and stood, his hands deep in his pockets, his jacket rucked beneath his arms. The dog was still barking in one of the gardens further down the Avenue. He looked up at the sky, it was still blue though the sun was going down slowly. And then he remembered how his own dog had barked like that when his parents had taken him as a child on holiday to one of the North Sea islands. It had barked and barked as his parents waded into the sea in red swimming costumes which reached to their knees. His mother had clasped his father’s short sleeve as she tried to keep her balance against the waves but she had brought him down as
well. He and his cousin Adam laughed until they ached, and his father and mother had laughed too.

Heine took another cigarette from the packet, tapping it on his nail before lighting it. This time there was no shred of tobacco to become caught between his lips. Again and again he heard that laughter and he knew that his father was a kind man, a precise man, but a man who could not see that the order he craved would only be achieved at great cost. That such order would only be achieved through black boots and brown shirts kicking and pulling and punching until the most common German words would be ‘
Vorsicht
’ and ‘
Leise sprechen
’.

‘Careful and speak softly,’ he repeated aloud in English, turning again to the house. Still there was no sign of Helen, but she was here with him, because it was through her that his love for his family had come back to him, for a moment at least.

If they married – but then Heine corrected himself – when they married, for he could not bear to think that they would not, he would take her to Germany because she had made him promise that he would. He touched his leg. He would take her to Hanover, his home town. He would take her to the forest near his home. They would walk beneath the elm, the ash, the beech and the linden and his leg would be less painful there, walking on the softness of mulched, shaded, ground. He would take her to one of the rest houses which were scattered through the forest. They would eat food cooked by the woodsman’s wife. Maybe they would see elk, or deer. Yes, he would take his ‘
Frauchen
’, his little wife, to the beauties of his land while they were still untainted.

He drew on the remains of his cigarette, the heat of the enflamed tip warmed his fingers. He would take her to the Kröpcke as he had promised today by the stream and they would sit within that glass-domed café and he would order her coffee topped with whipped cream and shavings of chocolate and watch while she ate enormous cream cakes. He would relax in her pleasure and her youth.

And yes, Helen, he said silently as he ground out his cigarette on the path, yes, I will take you to the land of my birth but I will not take you to Munich where my friends live; where something else is being born which will go far beyond law and order and decency, unless we protest again and again. And I am not there to do my share, because my mother made a
decision for me. Or did she, my love? Was I just scared of being hurt again?

The sun was fading now and still Helen had not come for him and so he moved to the low wall which edged the patio. Yes, his father was a kind man and would welcome the wife of his son even though she was English because, after all, she was Aryan. Yes, he was a kind man but was he still proud of his National Socialist membership? Did he still quote Herr Hitler’s every utterance as the Austrian toured the country electioneering? Heine was not sure whether he had spoken aloud, shouted aloud.

‘
Vorsicht, leise sprechen!
’ This time he knew that he spoke aloud but only in a whisper.

Then he heard the back door opening, and turned but did not move, could not move as he saw Helen coming towards him, because he could not tell from her face what their future would be.

Helen waited in the car as Heine walked to the German customs office carrying their passports and the international carnet. They had driven at a leisurely pace for several days through Belgium and it had been the honeymoon they had not yet had time for because Heine had been inundated with work. Only nine months late. She smiled as she ran her hand along the walnut dashboard of the motor car Uncle had lent them for the trip. She had not known life could be like this, that such happiness existed; that there were such nights of love, such days as gentle as a stream in full sun.

The wedding had been quiet. It had not taken place in Hemsham but in London, away from the neighbours. Her mother had not smiled even when Aunt Sarah and Uncle Harry had said how much they liked Heine.

He looks a good steady sort, they had said, with a damn sight more breeding than most and it’s something to have a thriving career these days. Helen had seen her mother looking at Heine, her pale eyes hard, but it did not matter now, she had Heine and their future, so full, so good. It swept memories to one side.

Now the birds sang from the branches of the trees, which were too far from her to give shade as she watched Heine talk to the German border officials. He had become quiet as they approached the customs post and she had watched as he gripped the wheel, his face becoming still, and she had heard him say through lips that barely moved, ‘So my darling, we enter the land of my countrymen, most of whom seem to have pebbles for eyes and cauliflowers for ears.’

Helen turned now to look at the slender pole which hung between two posts and barred their entry to Germany. What was this country like? What were his parents like?

She heard his uneven footsteps on the road and turned,
watching as he walked back to the car, his limp rather less noticeable than it had been last year. She smiled because he was smiling, the tension gone from his face, his body. The hot June sun was burning in through the windscreen of the car but it did not matter for soon they would be moving again. And soon she would meet the woman who had sent letters greeting her into the family and bone china handled fruit knives as a wedding present which her mother had sniffed at and polished up on her apron. Heine would meet his father again, and last night beneath the light sheet she had said that he should be gentle, for, after all, it was only politics which divided the two men, not years of struggle. She had not understood his silence but he had promised, and said bless you for being nineteen.

Heine eased himself behind the steering wheel and drove her past verges full of poppies, cornflowers, brown-eyed Susan and Queen Anne’s lace and entered villages down avenues bordered by orchards flushed with cherries, apples and pears. They swept through streets of black and white houses with window-boxes of petunias or geraniums. They stopped and ate sausage and bread in the car watching girls with coiled blonde hair throwing corn to geese, before easing themselves from their seats and walking to the village ponds, throwing their crusts to swans and brown ducks.

They stayed overnight in a room with a balcony and the next day they drove alongside fields of tall rye which swayed in the breeze and darkened as the clouds swirled briefly between earth and sun. Over to the east of the road hay was being pitched into wagons drawn first by horses on the lower slopes then oxen as the fields became steeper. Helen wished that she could take photographs as Heine was doing and he promised that on their return he would show her. He pushed strawberries into her mouth and kissed her and she could taste the strawberries on his lips too.

Soon they drove through sugar beet fields where women and children hoed between the rows and Heine said that they would be at his parents’ home soon and fell silent. But Helen would not let him sink again and made him tell her of the beet women. He told of how they had come after the war from the East; from Poland and Silesia to work on German farms during the beet harvest, for here they did not starve – not quite. He told of how they had married farmworkers and settled in
condemned farmhouses where they were secure as long as they stayed bound to the farmer. He stopped the car and pointed to a plot of land on which a woman and two children worked.

‘I used to watch them before I went to Munich, wondering how they could bear it. In the spring they single out the small plants. In the summer they hoe the weeds as they are doing now and in the autumn they pull out the beet.’

Helen peered forward, trying to see past him but there was no room so she opened the door and stood looking. She preferred the fresh air, it made her feel less nauseous but she would not tell him about that, not yet. The wind was brisker now, across the flatter lands. Heine turned off the engine and he too came and stood and looked.

‘I took many photographs, especially of the children. They start work at the age of six and here our winters come early and are not like English ones. I would see them tossing the beets into the carts in the snow and ice and hear their coughs. I exhibited the photographs in Munich but what can be done? It is, and was, work in a time of no work. It is food in a time of no food.’ He looked over to a clump of cottages in the distance. ‘I took photographs inside too, of the one large stew pot in the centre of the table, the spoons which were dug in all at once by thin armed, thin faced people.’

He turned again to the beet fields. ‘I felt so fortunate that I was not a beet picker, that I had the time and energy to think; something which is denied to these people. But now I wonder.’

Helen grasped his arm. ‘Come along, my love, the sun is out, this is our honeymoon. Or would you perhaps like us to move back here; pull beet, hoe, plant?’ She shook him and smiled, willing him to laugh and he did, and he kissed her and said against her mouth that no, no one in his family would ever have to hoe or pull beet and that while she was with him she kept the shadows from him.