The Edge of the Fall (13 page)

He was gripping her hands harder. The late autumn sun burnt his face. ‘Tell me about it. What happened? I want to help.'

She gazed back, looking at the flecks of hazel in his irises, the curve around the pupil, his hands around hers, the wrinkles on his hands becoming part of hers, the whorls on his thumbs touching her skin. She was about to speak, tell him. And then she stopped.

He was only there because he felt bad. Otherwise, he'd never see her, never want her. He hated her, was angry with the whole family. She shook her head. ‘It was kind of you to come. Really it was. But you can't help us.'

‘I could listen.'

‘You said you didn't want anything to do with, us.'

‘This is different.'

So you only want to see me when my cousin is dead
. She shook her head. He'd listen to her talking about Louisa, be kind, and then what? He'd go again, she'd write to him and he'd ignore her letters. She took her hands back to her lap. ‘Thank you for coming, Tom. Thank you for thinking of us. But I can't. You probably should go.' She watched him amble off, his tall body silhouetted against the dying sky. He walked towards the door of the parlour – she thought of calling him back, but he went into the house and the moment was gone.

EIGHT

Germany, August 1921

Celia

‘Celia!' shouted a voice. ‘This way! We're over here!' She looked around the dockyard. The boat pumped steam over their heads. Throngs of people in black were pushing towards her. She felt a hand seize hers and tried to shake it off. The voices around her were babbling words that sounded nothing like the German she knew from school.

‘Celia,' the voice said. ‘It's me!'

She looked at the dowdy woman holding her arm and realised it was cousin Hilde. She looked exhausted, brow furrowed, hair even paler than before.

What happened?
Celia wanted to ask. Instead, she grasped her cousin's hand. ‘Thank you for coming to meet me.'

Rudolf had finally allowed it. In the aftermath of Louisa's death, she'd begged him again to let her visit the Black Forest.

‘You're needed here,' he said. ‘Your mother needs you. Think what it's like for her, with Arthur gone, with Louisa . . .'

Celia shook her head. ‘It's just a few weeks. Please.'

And so Rudolf did, his face sad and old. Verena wept, but, thought Celia, she always wept.

Death by misadventure
. Louisa, dead at the bottom of the cliffs, her pretty hair ruined. The body in the ground. If Celia left, then maybe Arthur would come back. He'd return and the police would speak to him and everyone would know it was only an accident.

The newspapers had, for the most part, left them alone after
the coroner's verdict and Verena said people were speaking to her in the street once more. But still, the taint remained.

And then she reminded herself: what did it matter that the newspapers got it wrong? They were alive. Louisa was dead.

‘Thank you for visiting. We could never come to you in England.' Hilde's English was slower and more accented than it had been before. Of course, she wouldn't have been speaking much English over the years of the war.

‘You could now. They've changed the rules.'

Hilde shrugged. ‘No money. Come. My mother and father are waiting.' She took Celia's hand and led her through the crowds of people. Halfway through, she gave it a squeeze. ‘I'm glad I found you.' The porter hauled Celia's trunk behind them.

They finally pushed their way through to the far side of the crowd. There huddled Heinrich and Lotte, looking tiny, as if they'd shrunk. ‘You'll see Johann later,' Hilde said.

Celia wanted to hang back, keep hold of Hilde, but she knew she could not.

‘Hello, Celia,' said Heinrich, stepping forward. He held out his hand. ‘You have become an adult, a woman.' His back was bent, hair barely covering the top of his head. Lotte had been plump in the old days, floury cheeks, thick arms, hands always busy, cooking, baking, sewing, writing. Now her body was thin, and it looked as if her fair eyebrows had almost fallen out. She'd painted over them, carefully, with thick make-up, the black smudging into the surrounding skin.

‘I'm so sorry about Louisa,' she said. ‘What a shock for you.'

Celia nodded. ‘Yes.'

You've grown old
. But then, so had Rudolf, who now looked eighty when he was not even fifty, and Verena shuffled around Stoneythorpe, too tired to lift her feet. ‘You can talk to me in German,' she said instead. ‘I'll understand.'

‘Very well,' said Heinrich. ‘You can tell us if we're speaking too fast. Anyway, let us go. We must catch the train.' He did not make a movement toward the porter. Celia reached for her purse. She understood that she was looking after herself here; no father to
pay for a porter. Lotte patted Celia's arm. ‘Best not to speak too much, dear. Not on the train. Let us do the talking. You speak nicely – but still
foreign
.'

How was it, she asked herself, once they were finally bundled into the train, that she had thought Hilde and Johann and the family could stay the same? At home, at Stoneythorpe, they had all changed a hundredfold, everything altered or lost, but she had thought of her cousins in the Black Forest as unchanged, preserved like dried flowers and kept in a paperweight globe. But all of them were different and Celia wanted time to stop. If it ceased, if the clock face held still, then Louisa would be alive. She'd push back the hands and seize her that day in Covent Garden.

Hilde was talking about the scenery from the train window, praising the beauty of a river. Lotte was murmuring too, about the horizon. Celia tried to listen, forcing herself to smile.

She felt dark with shame: she could tell from the grey faces, the shabby, sick-looking people in the train, the ruined houses from the window; this country had suffered. It looked nothing like it had the last time she had visited, six years ago, when it had been all pretty cottages, flowered gardens, tall churches. And here she was, coming as if it were a holiday by the sea – as if this was the way to escape the hopelessness of home.

‘What is it, Celia?' said Heinrich. ‘Do you feel ill from the train?'

Celia shook her head. ‘Sorry.'

‘Well, we're nearly there. Johann will be pleased to see you.'

The thought of Johan threw her into confusion. He was her cousin, he was part of her, and yet he had been that most terrible thing: a German soldier. They had thrown gas at Tom, burnt Belgian babies.
No sense of fair play
, the newspapers had said. She thought of one story from
The Times
. A British company had laid down their weapons at precisely the moment of ceasefire, about to retreat. Instead, the Germans held out their weapons and fired, killing all twenty of the men, even though the war was over. Such cruelty.

The train was juddering to a halt. They clambered off, Hilde
helping to carry Celia's bag. The station, too, was nothing like it had been, the roof broken and the platform spattered with puddles. They piled on to a cart dragged by an exhausted-looking horse and set forth. Celia furrowed her brow, trying to stop the tears from falling. This was the enemy? This broken, ruined, grey place, dark roads full of people trudging, heads bent, stalls with a few sparse loaves of bread.

They passed through the village on an empty road. People stared up at them as they passed. The old church on the green was missing the top of its steeple.

‘The village is changed,' she said.

‘That's true,' replied Heinrich. ‘Much changed. Many of our friends have gone, moved to the city.'

‘I thought you worked in the city,' she said. He and Lotte had chosen the area when they got married. He'd longed to return to the village after growing up here and Lotte – despite being a Berlin girl – had always loved the country. He'd worked a few days a week in the city, and as soon as they'd had children, they'd never wanted to leave the village.

‘Not so much any more. I am like your father, a gentleman of leisure, thanks to my advanced age.'

They turned out of the village and along the road that led to the house. Celia felt the trees grow thicker and closer. Perhaps her mind was playing tricks on her, but she felt sure that there were fewer houses than there had been. There had been hotels along here, a few shops. Now the places looked like broken farmsteads, large cottages rather than the wide, expensive family houses she remembered. Hilde saw her eyes scanning around. ‘Sadly altered, I know. Luckily, dear, we have enough to get by. We don't have what we did – who does – but Heinrich saved carefully before the war. For that, we are thankful.'

They turned up the long drive leading to her uncle's home. She breathed a sigh of relief. Yes, it was shabbier, the door splintered and the sides of the roof broken. But it was still the same place, the dark wooden front, the tall windows, the flowers around the door.

‘Here we are!' said Heinrich. They climbed down from the cart, Heinrich holding her hand.

‘Johann!' he called. ‘We're here.'

The door pushed open and a thin, pale-haired man in a wheelchair struggled out. Celia clutched Hilde's hand.

‘What's happened?' she whispered. ‘What's happened to him?'

Hilde shrugged. ‘He lost his legs in the fighting. He was in France. Come, he'll be pleased to see you. He talks about you so much.'

They stepped towards him.

‘Hello,' she said to Johann, looking him straight in the eye but blushing to do it. Why did it hurt so to look at him? She smiled, shakily. Should she say: I'm sorry you lost your legs?

‘I'm a bit different,' he said, saying the word ‘different' in German. He gave her a shy smile. That hurt her; she knew he felt he had to make these jokes, to put people at their ease, so they wouldn't blush, feel bad. Hundreds of soldiers, she supposed, must be doing the same.

‘It's nice to see you,' she said. ‘It's been a long time. You've been fighting.'

He nodded. ‘I lost them near Etaples. I got sent there after recovering from injuries at Passchendaele, but I didn't last long!'

Tom had been in Passchendaele, she thought, gassed again there, come to them at Stoneythorpe coughing and sick. When she'd given any thought to Johann during the war she'd done her best to imagine that he must be in Russia or somewhere. Not France, not Etaples. Not there. He'd been maybe a mile from the ambulance station. Every night she had gone to sleep thinking about Michael – but it had been Johann who was nearer. He had been waiting in his trench, watching for the surges of men, listening to the guns.

‘We're very proud of our handsome young man,' said Lotte, clutching his shoulders.

Celia blushed awkwardly. ‘I'm sorry.'What was she apologising for – the battle, his death, the fact that she still had her legs?

He shrugged, gave her a bright smile that struck through to her heart. ‘I'm alive. We've all lost something.'

‘Now, now,' said Heinrich. ‘No dwelling on the past. We have our guest to stay. Let us go inside.' She followed him into the house, her heart beating hard.

‘We heard about your cousin,' said Johann. ‘I'm sorry you had to go through that.'

A thought struck her heart. ‘Did it reach the newspapers here?'

Heinrich shrugged. ‘Not really. Only a little because all the newspapers were writing about Arthur being German.'

Her heart sank again. Well, the papers had all been wrong! Lotte asked her questions about Louisa, Celia nodded, tried to explain clearly without letting the words pierce her heart.

After a drink of tea, Lotte showed Celia to her room, the same one Celia used to have, all those years ago. Now, since the roof was leaking above Hilde's own room, the two would be sharing.

‘I'm sorry about poor Michael,' Lotte said, laying covers on the bed. ‘Poor boy. So very sad.'

Celia nodded. She wanted to talk about Louisa again, but the words wouldn't come. ‘How is dear Verena?' Lotte continued. ‘How I wish we could see her.'

They talked for a while about Verena, the house, Arthur and Emmeline and the twins. The twins were the safest – Lotte launched into a long description of how to care for little ones.

Celia longed to go outside, run free towards the trees and the little stream that meandered in between them. But Hilde and Lotte were talking enthusiastically about babies and she didn't dare leave.

‘Mama wants grandchildren,' said Hilde, after Lotte finally wandered off to the kitchen. ‘She loves babies. She's not going to get them from either of us. Who'd have me?'

‘Lots of people,' said Celia, but lamely. There weren't any men for anyone in England – unless you happened to be rich and beautiful like Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, always in the society pages. ‘You're very pretty, Hilde. You shouldn't say things like that.'

‘I'm not pretty any more. It's all gone. And no one saw it either. I was just locked up here, waiting for news about Johann.'