Summer at Gaglow (13 page)

‘You’re not going to keep it?’ She drank my brandy for me. ‘What about your career?’

‘Come on.’ I didn’t have a career, we both knew that. The occasional odd job on the Fringe. Someone’s daughter, sister, wife. A small tour around the Lake District.

Pam topped up her own glass. ‘I give up.’ She raised a toast to the tiny speck of baby and knocked it back in one.

‘So what are you going to call it?’ she asked, snuggling down, and we lay there for the rest of the day until we came up with Daisy. Daisy Pamela Linder. And I swore I’d never take him back, however much he begged.

Mike came back the next day to collect his things. I’d considered packing them but decided it was too much trouble.

‘Ruin your life? I wouldn’t waste my time.’ But he looked at me, superior and cool, suggesting we try and remain friends. ‘Friends,’ I yelled, my mouth out of control, ‘who loathe and detest each other.’ And he walked off, straight-backed, down the street while I lay down in the hall to cry.

My mother arrived at the hospital with a box of Portuguese cakes. ‘How are you feeling?’ Before I had time to answer tears were rolling down my face. She sat and held my hand. ‘It’s all right.’

When I found my breath, I stuttered, ‘He didn’t come.’

‘You’re doing fine.’ She shook her head from side to side with little soothing tuts, and I thought of her, all those years before, waiting to see if my father would appear.

Mike had a taxi waiting. He’d come to take us home. I was dressed in real clothes for the first time in a week and Sonny had a soft wool cardigan over his suit. His eyes were open, liquid and long, and the skin of his lids was mauve. ‘I bought a hat for him,’ Mike said, and he stooped to slip it on. It was a pronged hat that came down over his eyes and he looked so funny in it, like a little bag of flour knotted at the top, that I had to clutch my stomach to stop my stitches pulling while I laughed. The woman in the next bed made us stop for a photograph and we stood there, the three of us in a group, just like a real family, all ready to go home. ‘Here you go’ – and the flash of the camera woke me up.

I was lying on my own bed, fully clothed with Sonny squashed under my arm. My sisters, not Mike, had brought us home. Natasha had even cleaned her car in honour of the drive, and when I arrived I found fresh flowers by the window and Sonny’s crib set up beside my bed. They’d heaped the sofa with pillows to support my feeding arm and set out lunch on the table. There was Greek food, white bread with feta cheese, cucumber cut up into squares and a tomato salad thick with coriander seeds and olives. My mouth, acclimatized to hospital food, stung with the sharp tastes. I hope this doesn’t affect my milk, I wondered, sucking specks of chilli off an olive, and I heaped my plate with more.

There had been no news from Mike, and the thought of him mingled with my exhaustion. What I hate about him most, I decided, is that just when I’m feeling really furious it occurs to me that he might, just possibly, have been run over by a bus.

I shifted a little to look down at the baby. He was on his back with his arms up by his head, his fingers, still wrinkled with loose skin, curled out like a starfish, and collected in the sweet pout of his mouth was a tiny row of bubbles. Natasha and Kate must have crept out by themselves while I was asleep because from my bed I could see a mobile of transparent shells, a present from them both pinned up against the window.

It was three more days before Mike called. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he started, ‘but I was suddenly called away on a job.’ And I could tell that he was desperate to say more.

‘I don’t care, there’s no excuse.’ I clenched my body hard against a rush of tears.

‘Someone dropped out, and I had to go off without any notice. We were out on location, and when I did get a chance to phone it was always after midnight. You know what it’s like.’

‘I don’t know, actually.’

‘Look, can I come round?’

But I gripped my sweating hand and very calmly said he couldn’t. ‘I don’t want to see you,’ I explained slowly, as if to a child. And for a moment even I believed that it was true.

Sonny was two weeks old when we set off for our first sitting.

‘Well, I don’t suppose we’d better be late.’ I strapped him into Natasha’s car, and with great care we pulled out into the traffic.

‘I can’t believe you’re doing this.’ Kate leant over from the front and I tried to explain it had seemed a good idea at the time.

‘You’re completely mad.’ Natasha was the only one of us who never sat. She’d done one picture when she was sixteen, ‘He made me look like a cross-Channel swimmer,’ and she refused ever to pose again. Kate, like me, had modelled countless times.

‘He’s a difficult person to say no to,’ we protested.

‘Your problem,’ Natasha cut in, ‘is you’ve got nothing better to do.’

‘And neither has Sonny,’ Kate pointed out. Kate worked as an editor for films. It was a job like mine with endless lulls. ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ she insisted, ‘this is going to be my last painting.’ And Natasha said that now he had another model he could afford to let her go.

‘I like sitting,’ I said, and I thought of the soft light of the studio, the stories and the food, and I tried to make myself remember to ask him more about Emanuel Belgard and what had happened to him in the war.

‘They never mentioned him,’ my father said, once Sonny was lying beside me on the sofa. I’d had to explain he wouldn’t tolerate even a minute without his clothes.

‘He was a sort of black sheep, as far as I can tell, although he did have some extraordinary adventures.’ And I begged him to think up what they might have been.

‘Yes, yes,’ he murmured, but he was too taken up with fitting Sonny in under my arm.

I had propped a pillow under my shoulder to support myself while I looked down on my baby’s sleeping face. I found I could stare at him for hours, the rounded eyelids, pale purple, and the eyebrows, a tiny sketch of gold. The hair on his head was dark, a little oily fringe around the back, but with each day I noticed it was lightening.

My father stopped, a stick of charcoal in mid-air. ‘Could you just turn her a fraction this way?’

I shifted my arm and rolled the pillow. ‘Him,’ I corrected, and I took the opportunity to brush his warm cheek with my lips, feeling for his toes which didn’t quite reach down into his towelling feet.

‘Do you need a break?’ he asked, quite out of character, but I didn’t want to waste the time while Sonny slept.

Sonny was a charcoal outline, his nose up in the air, his hands like paws, and as my father took a small brush and mashed it up with paint, I watched to see where he would start. He always started with my eyes, but I knew from glancing at other canvases this wasn’t always the way. There was one abandoned mouth, a nose, a knee pressed close against another and one disembodied penis, hanging from a smudge of ginger hair. With one swift move he started on Sonny’s ear. He curled the pink lip over, swirling up the colour to form the sinews of the shell.

‘You’re working so fast,’ I said, when finally we stopped.

The paint had spread out to incorporate Sonny’s mouth, blistered into coral from continuous sucking. He muttered as I slipped away, his hands flying out to catch me, but he was too full and drowsy to wake up. It made me laugh to see him at a distance, a plump green bug against the sofa flowers, and I tore myself away to make some tea.

‘Do you want a cup?’ I called through to my father, but he was watching Sonny as he slept, moving his head from side to side to try to measure him against the work. He hesitated, his fingers teasing out his rag, and I held my breath for him to be wiped out. ‘Tea?’ I said again, and he held out his hand for a cup. I’m so glad I’m doing this, I thought, as I snuggled back on to the sofa, glancing down at the rise and fall of Sonny’s breath, watching while the paint built up around the ear, thickening against his skull.

‘Oh, yes, I do remember one thing,’ my father said, surprising me. ‘My mother, when she was a little girl, gave Emanuel some bosom-enlarging pills as a present on his birthday. ‘“Pilule Oriental”, she said they were.’ And he smiled to himself as he worked on.

It was not at all what I’d expected. I’d imagined embroidery and silk, heavy silver watches and ashtrays in carved glass. ‘Was he pleased?’ I wondered.

‘I don’t suppose so,’ and we both started to laugh.

As soon as we got home, Sonny woke up and it was midnight before he was tired enough to sleep again. ‘Oh, Pam,’ I wailed into her answerphone, ‘why did I ever agree to this?’ But Pam had been cast as a suspect in a detective series set in Leeds and wouldn’t be back for several weeks.

‘How did it go?’ Natasha called the next day, and choking on my pride, my eyes red with exhaustion, I said it had gone really well.

Mike sent a card with a cheque tucked inside it for two hundred pounds, ‘Hope you’re both thriving,’ and there was his telephone number, quite unnecessarily printed in brackets after his name. Pam had made me promise not to call him, ‘You’re better off without the selfish, thoughtless bastard,’ and I knew that it was true.

Chapter 11

Emanuel refused to take the carefully prepared food Marianna tried to press on him, but packed his bags instead with books. He left hollow dusty spaces in the library where entire volumes were prised out and then abandoned, left lying in piles on the centre table. The books he chose to take were all poems and philosophy. Kleist and Nietzsche. Strindberg’s
The Agony of Conscience
, from which he memorized whole passages, and Schopenhauer’s
Correspondences
.

‘I have been promoted,’ he told his family, as he set off for the train, ‘to the staff of the regiment.’ But he fought off their warm congratulations, their surprise that he hadn’t mentioned it before, and insisted that his predecessor had been dismissed for misspelling a word.

‘Well, really, Manu, this is wonderful news.’ His mother moved to embrace him, and slipping her hand into his, Eva whispered, ‘But you would never make a mistake like that so we won’t even think about it.’

Bina narrowed her eyes at him. ‘A simple German fulfilment is the greatest thing about this war, greater than all the brilliant deeds of individuals, and it is only because of this that we are winning.’

Emanuel stiffened, and Wolf turned sharply on his daughter and asked where she found the opportunity to air such views.

‘Are we really winning?’ Martha asked, but Bina put her chin in the air and refused to answer.

Emanuel looked over at his father. Wolf’s hair had turned from grey to silver in the course of the last year and the two lines between his still black eyebrows were held now in a perpetual frown. He knew that his father had guessed what his mother and sisters never would: that this promotion might have come to him months earlier, possibly at the end of the previous year, if he had been the son of another, more established family.

‘Well, in my opinion it is the best possible news.’ Wolf put a hand on his son’s shoulder, and together they walked towards the carriage. Eva followed, kicking small stones with the scuffed ends of her shoes. ‘Manu,’ she called, but the horses had begun to rustle, sidestepping against each other, ready to be off. ‘Manu.’ As she turned she saw, framed in the long window above the porch, the pale figure of her governess waving in large urgent strokes.

Emanuel felt it was a mistake to have returned to Gaglow. Even though there had been little choice over the taking of his leave, he might have resisted the summer comfort of the estate and his mother’s overwhelming care, and made his way instead to Berlin where the apartment was locked up. He could have lived among the shrouded furniture, surviving on war rations and preserved fruit. And if he had done this, perhaps, then possibly his punishment would not now be so great. ‘I know I shouldn’t complain,’ he murmured, several times a day, but he could not shake off the feeling that what he was enduring was a form of torture.

Emanuel was stationed in a remote farmhouse in the Russian woods. At first he had been involved in spying missions to check on the cut and colour of the enemy’s uniform, and had returned victorious after glimpsing through a thicket a straggly bunch of Cossacks, their faces obscured by beards, their coats so worn and battered as to make them almost invisible in the camouflage of the surrounding trees. But early snows had made such trips impossible, and now if any excursions were to be attempted they had to be made by sled. Emanuel was no longer able to ride out into the night to visit solitary stations stretched across the plains. He missed the satisfying glow of the sun rising as, his mission completed, he sank on to his bed. ‘I should not complain, I know,’ he said when, day after day, the only orders that came down to him were to teach a group of soldiers how to ski. A ski port had been built the previous year, and it made Emanuel smile to think how, even then, he would have welcomed as hilarious the chance to practise cross-country in this most unlikely situation. The men under his command had the appearance of being in the highest spirits, and they laughed continuously and bombarded each other with desperate jokes. Emanuel watched them closely as they wound their way by sled to practise every morning, and although they regularly threw each other to the ground and pelted snow into the faces of their friends, he came to the conclusion, after several weeks of observation, that they were just as miserable as he was.

He wrote in a reluctant letter home,

This great time is gradually becoming smaller. We can hardly move from the front door, and mostly I sit inside the house playing chess and marking the route of our advances on maps. I know I am in an enviable position, but really with so much time on one’s hands it is impossible not to wonder – what is the point of it all? I wake up every morning with the heavy thought that I am not being used, and spend the day trying to shake off the subsequent feeling of being useless. By nightfall, having achieved nothing, I fall exhausted back on to my bed.

These letters, by the simple fact of their existence, lightened Marianna’s heart. She sent Emanuel cheering, passionate replies, full of instances of his own importance, and in every daily letter she slipped in some news of the loss, by death or maiming, of the son, cousin or nephew of a family of her acquaintance, who had had the bad luck to have been posted to more dangerous parts.