Somewhere Over England (7 page)

He stood in the doorway, leaning against the doorpost, his eyes watching Christoph as he dropped his toast on the floor and smeared butter all over his face. His shrieks and banging were the only noise between them.

Helen leaned back against the sink. It was cool across her back. She looked at the brown lino which was worn in the far corner, the strands of hemp showing through.

Heine spoke. ‘You are right, my little wife. I’m sorry.’ He blew her a kiss and she watched him as he left and thought, I am not a little wife, I am an adult.

In December 1934 Christoph was two. In 1935 conscription came into being in Germany, Hitler took possession of the Saar, and Helen’s house became even more full of frightened, thin young men. Her mother no longer came to stay because it was not proper amongst so many foreigners and there never seemed to be the time to try and make her understand how necessary it was. How it would not last for ever because Hitler would fall. Surely he would fall?

But her mother should have known it was necessary, Heine told Helen. There wasn’t time to make him understand that the distance between mother and daughter was still too wide to discuss such things.

There were camp beds in the sitting-room and the spare room and others were folded up ready for use if necessary in the studio. Heine was eager and young, his limp hardly noticeable. He talked until the early hours with the refugees until they left to go to jobs and countries Heine and his friends had organised. But always new ones came, occasionally bringing wives, sisters, children, and the sunshine of their honeymoon seemed never to have existed.

The refugees were ‘placed’ but sometimes it was difficult as the flood of those escaping the swastikas and black boots increased and so some stayed on. Each night when she returned from carrying out commissions and Christoph was in
bed, they talked over wine and sometimes remembered to speak in English until Helen left to work again or sleep, but she never slept soundly now and her dreams were bleak.

Full of the horrors she had listened to, steeped in loneliness, one night she dreamed of a lichen-covered bridge and hands which held her safe and she woke up crying.

At night Heine crept in beside her and sometimes he would hold her but he was tired, so tired, and so was she. Christoph was passed from one to another and did not know that his father was different to all these uncles.

At the beginning of May in 1935 they had only four staying and on Silver Jubilee Day she helped the neighbours set out trestle tables in the street while red, white and blue bunting hung across the road, and she asked Heine who was sitting at his desk to carry down some cakes and to come and join her and watch his son enjoy himself.

‘I am so busy, my darling. I have letters to write.’

He had said that too often and Helen felt the anger come. It crept from every pore of her skin and she knew now that it had been there for months and months but it had not formed into words in her head until now. But why this moment? She did not know, except that she was English and this was an English celebration and she asked nothing of him but that he should join her, as she had for so long joined him. She turned to the window, where they were on a level with the bunting. She watched Mr Frazer who lived above the tobacco shop hauling on a line festooned with flags which stretched from his flat window to Mrs Briggs who lived opposite. Heine had never met them, he did not even know their names.

All she asked was a little of his time for the world which she and their son lived in and he would not give her even that. There were so many other people in their lives, so much that needed doing; but there should be time for happiness as there once was. She smoothed the curtain between her fingers, rubbing up and down, up and down. Then she turned, looking at Hans, Georg, Hermann, Ernst who had been with them for two months.

‘You will all come to see how we in England celebrate, and you, Heine, you will come too.’ And her voice was firm. She walked to the desk and covered the notepaper that he had pulled towards him. ‘You will come because you are part of
England now. You will come because your English-German son needs you there.’ The paper was cold and dead, the room was quiet.

Heine looked at her, his eyes puzzled, surprised.

‘You will come because you are my husband and I need you there.’ Her voice was calm but the anger sounded in her own ears and she wondered when the child inside her had gone and this woman had taken her place.

Helen turned then, walked past Hans standing awkwardly by the door, his face turned from her in embarrassment. She stooped and picked Christoph from his playpen, sitting him on her hip. She did not look back but walked from the door to the studio where she picked up her Leica, for she never went anywhere without it now.

‘You will come,’ she said as she walked down the stairs feeling so much older than twenty-two. The stairs needed painting. The pushchair had marked the walls and too many hands had felt their way up. Perhaps she would ask Hans and the others to help, and Heine too. But, of course, he would be too busy. As she reached the street the daylight hurt her eyes. The flags were thrashing on their poles in a burst of wind and she turned and looked up at the windows of their flat. Would he come?

He came with the cakes and the jelly and the hats she had cut from coloured paper, and Hans, Georg, Hermann and Ernst came too and they danced throughout the afternoon and evening and Heine bought wine for the street because Helen had worked on five studio portraits in two weeks and for once all the bills had been paid on time.

Helen laughed with Marian, the girl who was married to the greengrocer and gave Helen yesterday’s vegetables without charge for the rabbit they both knew she did not have. She had a daughter of four and Helen had photographed her in return. Heine drank with her husband Rob and learned of this for the first time. He kissed his wife though she did not know why, and then sat Christoph on his shoulders and danced him up the street and back again along with the surging crowd. For the first time he met and spoke to their neighbours in the street.

That night he helped Helen to bath Christoph and he said he had not realised he had grown so much and bent over the cot to watch him fall asleep. He had not looked at him for so long; he
had not looked at his wife for so long. He must remember that they existed. He must remember that he loved them; that he was responsible for them.

Helen stood in the doorway, glad that at least this room was safe. Its ornaments of trains and dogs and bricks in place on the mantelpiece. This was family territory, to be kept secure for her son. There would be no sleeping bags here, no camp beds.

That night Heine made love to her, slowly, gently, and she wept and told him how much she loved him and he said that she would always be loved by him.

‘Will I?’ she asked against his shoulder. ‘Will Christoph?’ She dreamed of the dark cupboard that night.

Helen’s photographs of the Silver Jubilee celebrations were bought by an American magazine and she celebrated with champagne. She and Heine had one glass only for there were three others with them, but what did it matter? Isaac’s cousin Joseph laughed with them and Wilhelm and Günther too and it was good to see their eyes full of fun, their pain, which tore at Helen daily, gone for just a moment. But then Heine left to meet a contact. Helen watched him leave without surprise for what else had she come to expect? She pushed the bottle with one more glass in it towards the bruised, thin boys who were as young as she was and went to bed alone, for that also she had come to expect.

In 1936 during a January that was dank and cold George V was laid to rest and Helen and her mother lined the route. Christoph was warm in his knitted suit and coat and he wore a black arm band like the rest of the crowd. The mood was sombre. Helen was thoughtful as her mother pointed out King Edward VIII walking behind the gun carriage pulled by sailors because she had read in the letters which came from America of the liaison between Edward and Mrs Simpson. She brushed the hair from her eyes. So even the succession seemed as uncertain as the rest of the world, which darkened as Hitler and Mussolini growled and raged. Peace was never more fragile, Heine had said, and Helen feared that he was right and what would happen then to a German who lived in England?

Her mother held Christoph’s hand as Helen lifted him high on to her shoulders.

‘That’s right, then he can see and tell his own children, poor
little mite,’ her mother said, glaring at the man behind who clicked his teeth and moved so that he could also see.

‘But he won’t remember surely? He’s only three,’ Helen commented.

‘You always said you remembered your father taking you to the stream at that age. He was on leave,’ her mother said with an edge to her voice, a voice which had been more mellow since Helen had begun to take Christoph to see her every two months. Alone of course. Her mother was looking back at the procession now; it was almost past.

Helen looked up at the grey sky. She must go to the stream and take Christoph. She touched his knee briefly with her ungloved hand. The wind was sharp now and her fingers were becoming numb. She lifted her camera to her eye again and took more photographs because she did not want to think about why she had not thought of going to the stream with Heine.

‘You’ll get the backs of all these people,’ her mother protested.

Helen smiled. ‘I know, Mother,’ she said as she took more and more, glad of her interruption. ‘That’s what I wanted to do, to somehow catch the bowed shoulders of the people, the hats being removed, the sadness against the pomp.’

‘Oh really, Helen, you don’t sound like a mother at all. What is this poor boy growing up into. All he’ll know about is camera angles, public meetings, distant views. It’s not right. And all those men cluttering up the house. It’s just not decent, you know. I can’t imagine what your neighbours think.’

Helen didn’t know either because she did not ask them. She covered the lens with the cap and shrugged, lifting Christoph down, holding him close.

‘We do all right, don’t we, my darling? You have lots of uncles and I take you to the swings. And he has his books and toys and his own room when they smoke too much.’ She did not add that these days she too stayed in her own room when the processing was finished for there seemed no place for her. But her work was becoming more popular and it enabled them to help more of those persecuted by that mad Austrian.

She lifted him into his pushchair, brushing the hair out of her eyes. ‘Anyway, tonight there is no one there, not even Heine. He’s taken three of them to Liverpool to board a ship.’ Helen
pushed a way through the crowd for them both and did not see the smile on her mother’s face. The pushchair caught on a lamppost and she heaved at it, pulling it clear.

That night they sat in front of the fire and Helen enjoyed the clean air, the sound of the gas spluttering and hissing, the click of her mother’s knitting, and for the first time since last winter she too picked up wool and needles and began a jacket for Christoph. They did not talk but listened to the wireless and then they drank cocoa and said goodnight. Helen was glad that she had replaced the hair brushes, stacked away the camp beds and made the spare room her mother’s, just for tonight. As she watched her close the door she realised that this evening she had not been lonely.

As she lay in bed she felt her limbs relax and grow heavy and again she wondered why she had not thought of taking Heine to Hemsham, to the stream. She watched the clouds gust between the moon and earth, blocking the light and releasing it, and faced now the separateness of their lives. She did not ask for Heine’s company these days because, with a blown kiss, he would refuse. Too much to do. Too many important things to do, he would say. Some other time when it is over. But when would that ever be, Helen wondered, turning over and holding his pillow to her, pushing back despair, breathing in his scent.

A New York magazine bought Helen’s pictures but addressed the letter to H. Weber, Esquire. Heine was pleased at the news and said the cheque would pay the telephone final demand and the extra food bill which was larger still this time.

By August 1936 unemployment was falling in Britain but Hitler’s troops had entered the Rhineland and Mosley’s Fascists were pinning up anti-Semitic posters in the East End. Helen left Christoph with Marian and went to photograph these and was hit across the face by one of the blackshirts and called a Jewish bitch. She told Heine as the pain throbbed through her face and he said that now she knew how his friends felt, but that their treatment was much worse, and he did not turn from the letter he was writing.

She looked at the back of his head and wanted to scream that she already knew how his friends felt, hadn’t she listened to them and cried with them, cooked and washed for them, soothed their nightmares and not resented one moment? No, it was not that she resented but she said nothing, just turned from
him and bathed her face in cold water and then slept that night with her back turned to his still body.

The next day she took Marian and her daughter Emily and Christoph on the train to Eastbourne for Bank Holiday Monday. The sun was hot and soaked deep into her skin, reddening her arms and her legs where she had pulled up her skirts. The deckchair dug into the backs of her thighs but she watched Christoph hold his face to the sun and forgot the ache in her cheek. But the sun could not warm the coldness she felt deep inside.

They ate sandwiches curled at the edges and ice-creams which a man in a red and white-striped apron and cardboard top hat dug out of a round tin container with a scoop which he dipped into a jug of water first. Christoph smeared his across his face and up into his hair as well as his mouth but Emily licked hers carefully and her dress was not marked either. Helen took photographs of them both and of Marian and Marian took one of Christoph and Helen together and as the sun at last lost its heat they straggled back to the station.

They took an Underground train from the station and Helen waved goodbye to Marian before climbing the stairs to the flat. No one was there and in Christoph’s room his small bed had gone and there were two camp beds. For a moment she felt as though the air had gushed from her body but then something deeper than rage gripped her, mobilised her.