The Crooked Maid (2 page)

“
Bonsoir, madame
. But we weren’t told that such a beauty shared the train with us. You travel with your son?”

She looked up at him, studied his bluffly handsome features, then turned her head away to stare into the darkness of the window. She was not wearing a hat. In her reflection she was struck by how red her lipstick
looked, how pale and delicate the long powdered plains of her cheeks. The soldier bowed down to her so that his own reflection loomed next to hers, blue eyes growing out of the undulations of her auburn hair. His lips were very close to her ear.

“
Madame
,” he tried again, switching to German. “
Ich Sie kompliment auf Ihrs
—” He stopped, struggled for the word.

“
Schönheit—beauté
,” the schoolboy piped up, then added in rapid schoolboy French: “
Mais je ne suis pas son fils
.”

The soldier straightened, turned around. His comrades likewise shifted their attention from one side of the compartment to the other. It was like the sea-heave of the ocean. Pretty soon they would all swing back.

“So you speak French, boy?”

“Yes.
Je m’appelle Robert Seidel. Je suis de Vienne
. I speak quite well, don’t you think? I can understand you quite clearly.”

“And
madame
? Does she not speak it?”

“I suppose not.”

The soldier took this in, stood pondering, lit a cigarette, blew smoke into the air.

“And she really isn’t your mother?”

“Not a bit,” the schoolboy answered, still in his quick if clumsy French. “We have only just met. I don’t even know her name.”

“Then perhaps you can translate.” The Frenchman turned his back on the boy, leaned a hand onto the expanse of window to his side, and stooped down once again to the woman with the made-up lips. “Tell her she is very beautiful.”

“I can’t tell her that!”

“Tell her, boy, or I’ll box your ears.”

The boy seemed undaunted by the threat, and inclined to argue, but a different thought took hold of him just then, and he licked his lips as he sat looking for the right phrase.

“He says,” he said at last, speaking at the back of the man, who stood blocking his view, and craning his neck around the man’s buttocks to
watch her reaction, “he says to tell you that you are very beautiful.” He paused, flashed her a smile unspoiled by irony. “I suppose he doesn’t mean anything by it.”

“Doesn’t he?” the woman answered. She looked up at the soldier’s face, first with annoyance then with something like warmth, and spoke her words softly, a half smile playing on her lips. “Tell him I am married. Tell him my husband was in the war.”

The boy did as he was bidden, and almost immediately the Frenchman’s expression changed and turned from smile to frown. He turned around to consult with his comrades in rapid whispers, then swung back towards the woman.

“Where did he serve? Which front? In the east or in the west?”

Again the schoolboy translated his words, more boldly this time, his dark eyes shining with his own curiosity.

She took her time with the answer, played with the gloves she had placed on the seat next to her, hooded eyes studying the man. “In the east,” she said at last. “But that’s just a matter of chance. He would have gone west, had he been asked. All the way to the Eiffel Tower.”

The boy translated as best he could, stumbling a little over the conditional. Despite the woman’s assertion, the soldiers relaxed as soon as they heard that her husband had been shooting at Russians, not Frenchmen.

“Tell her,” said their leader, raising a hand to his lips and kissing his fingertips in a quick and habitual motion, “that she has the most beautiful eyes. It is foolish of her husband to have her travel alone.”

The boy launched himself into the sentence, but all of a sudden the woman seemed to tire of the game.

“Enough,” she said in perfect French. “You have paid your compliments. You are very gallant and no doubt a formidable lover. I am flattered, but married. And rich enough to buy my own stockings, or chocolate, or whatever it is you wish to trade.” Her voice was quiet, though not without a certain force. “It would be tiresome if this grew into an incident involving your commanding officer, don’t you think?”

She flapped her gloves in front of her face, dismissing them. The blond soldier blanched and straightened up. He seemed to wish to say something more, but was lost for words; whipped around and pushed one of his comrades in the direction of the door into the corridor; threw his cigarette down at their feet. In the doorway he took a moment to turn around, blow a line of spit past his chin onto the floor.

“
Putain
,” he mouthed. “German whore.”

The schoolboy heard it and jumped to his feet.

“You mustn’t call her names!” he shouted, more in reproach than anger, then stumbled forward as the train entered upon a curve. He fell to one knee and collided head to groin with the soldier at the door. The man took hold of a fist-load of his hair and shoved him back contemptuously into his seat. He spat once more, turned, and left the door open as he followed his comrades back down the corridor towards the second-class section of the train.

“Gentlemen, he’s led you on,” the woman called after them, her voice gently mocking. “
Il est bien possible qu’il soit mon fils
.—Perhaps he is my son after all.”

She blocked with a stare the boy’s attempt to run and give chase. The next instant they entered a tunnel. Darkness swallowed them, sang back the screech of the train’s rapid journey. When they emerged, the boy had shed his anger. He was laughing.

“You speak French,” he laughed, “and so much better than I.
Mais vous n’avez rien dit!
”

She felt it would be churlish not to join him in his laughter. It took them some minutes to calm down.

“Is it true, though?” the boy asked at last. “Your husband is a soldier?”

“Was,” she said, and smoothed her skirt over her thighs. “An officer in the medical corps.”

“He wasn’t killed, was he?”

“No. He lived. He was taken prisoner.”

“By the Russians.”

“Yes.”

“And now?”

“And now?” She paused, smiled, studied the face of this strange boy across. There was no malice there, just good-natured curiosity, and a guileless wonder at the world. One had to search out his eye—the one that lay broken in its socket—to remind oneself that he too must have some knowledge of pain, however vague.

“As a matter of fact he’s just been released. I’m on my way to meet him.”

The boy made to ask more, leaning forward in his eagerness to learn, but she quickly interrupted him.

“Does it hurt?” she asked. “Your eye, I mean. It looks like the bones weren’t set properly.”

She reached out and touched him, to the left of his brow. He blushed under her touch. It pleased her to see it. He really was a very pretty young man. She allowed her fingers to linger, then settled herself back in her seat. It took him some moments to recover and answer her question.

“It doesn’t hurt,” he said. “Only sometimes—”

“Yes?”

All at once his voice took on the urgency of confidence. It was as though he thought himself back in the dormitory, swapping secrets across a linen sheet.

“It’s stupid. But when I look in the mirror sometimes, in the morning you see, when I’m still sleepy (I’m not a good riser—not that I’m lazy, mind, I try not to be, but in the morning I find it hard to find my feet, I even get dizzy sometimes), I catch sight of the eye, hanging there in the mirror, and, well, for a moment I myself don’t know what to do with it. I mean, it doesn’t look right.”

He gesticulated, bit his lip in frustration at his inability to explain himself.

“It’s even a bit spooky. I stare in the mirror, and the eye stares right back. It’s as though it belongs to someone else.

“My father is dead,” he added after a pause, carried away by a chain
of associations she found hard to reconstruct. “He died when I was still a little boy. I wonder sometimes—but it’s too stupid to say it out loud.” He looked up then, stared at her shyly past his coal-black lashes. “Is it very ugly?”

She laughed, brushed away the question with a wave of her hand. “Your mother remarried?”

“Yes. A Herr Seidel. He insisted that I take his name. To be honest, I hardly know him at all. We’d only lived with him for a short while when I was sent away to school. And with the war and all … In short, I’ve not seen him in years. Nor mother.”

“What was your father’s name?”

“Teuben,” the boy said, gratified that she had asked. “Maybe you have heard of him. He was a famous detective.”

The woman nodded blankly. The name was unknown to her.

She stood up and excused herself, went to the toilet.

3.

When she returned, the boy was standing on his seat, digging around in his knapsack. He produced a bottle of milk that had evidently leaked: the top inch of liquid was missing and the bottle sticky with its spilled contents. He took a swig, then offered it to her like a workman passing around a cigarette. She declined. The milk clung to the down on his upper lip. She laughed, and he looked at her confused until she raised her finger to her own mouth and ran it lightly along its curve. His hand mirrored the gesture, shook loose some pearls of milk. Embarrassed, yet smiling all the same, he began to wipe at his lips with his sleeve and the back of his hand. She offered him a handkerchief and he took it, then decided it was too precious or too clean to be put to the profane use of wiping his mug. He sat there with the silk hanky in one fist and the milk bottle in the other, a sheepish smile upon his face.

The train hissed, rolled to a stop. All at once the electricity failed both
in the corridor and in the compartment itself. They sat in total darkness. She could hear the boy’s breathing. A cone of light lit up the corridor outside the compartment, ran shakily along the carpet, the windows, the ceiling. She expected the conductor to show, torch in hand, and explain the latest breakdown, but the light flickered and disappeared without anyone entering the compartment. The rain grew stronger, beat patterns on the windowpane. The boy across kept shifting in his seat: the creak of leather underneath his skinny bum. She reached out into the darkness, found his knee, then his hand. They linked fingers, very lightly. Minutes slipped past. She raised her left wrist to her eyes but could not make out her watch. It must have been gone midnight. In her right hand the boy’s fingers beat an urgent pulse into her own.

She broke the silence.

“Before,” she said, “when we weren’t yet talking. You took out a sketchpad, then put it away again. You wanted to draw me.”

“Yes,” he answered, though it hadn’t been a question. “But it seemed rude, drawing a stranger. And besides—you would have asked to see the picture.”

In the darkness she could hear him lean his face against the pane.

“I’m not very good, you see.”

“What is it about me you wanted to draw?”

He answered her without the slightest hesitation, as though he had waited for her to ask him precisely this. As before, when he’d told her about his eye, his voice took on a special sort of quality, at once secretive and earnest. A child might make its confession in a voice like this: shuffling its feet, slyly proud at the wit of its new sin.

“I wanted to draw your face,” he said. “Your lips, actually. You have a long upper lip. It curves, a little lopsided, and there’s almost no dip at the centre. Under the nose, I mean. I’ve read about it in novels but have never really seen one. ‘
A cruel upper lip
.’ That, and your hands are very large.”

“That doesn’t sound very appealing.”

“But it is!” he protested, almost yanking free of her grasp. “It’s true, you know. What the soldier said before.”

“That I am beautiful.”

“Yes.”

“I’m old,” she sighed, gratified, and let go of his hand.

For a half-hour or so neither of them spoke. She pulled her legs up onto the seat next to her and willed herself asleep. In her head an image formed, of her husband’s face with sunken cheeks. His eye was broken, and he hadn’t shaved. In his mouth there stuck a cigarette. The smoke kept stinging her eyes.

A sudden tremor ran through the train, tossed her out of her half-formed dream. It was followed by first a screech, then a long and rasping whinny. She sat up, alarmed, still enveloped in darkness. The train jerked, struggled, lay silent; raindrops pelting the windowpane with the force of a proper storm. A flash of lightning off in the distance gave them a moment’s illumination. She saw the boy’s face, artless and smiling, glad to be trapped in the storm with his milk bottle, his knapsack, and her. Then, in the renewed darkness, a thought must have come to him. He soon put it into words.

“How long has it been?” he asked. “Since you last saw your husband?”

She yawned then stretched, took her time with the answer. “Nine years.”

He whistled in his schoolboy manner, did the maths. “But that’s longer than—I mean, unless he was in the army even before—Or perhaps it’s been eight and a half—”

“Nine years,” she repeated. “Since the spring of ’39. He wasn’t conscripted until March 1940.”

She paused, gave the boy time to formulate a theory.

“He left you,” he said at last. “And now he wants you back.”

She laughed out loud, listened to herself.
A cruel laugh
, she thought,
to go with my cruel upper lip
.

“I left him,” she said. “He was having an affair.”

“Oh no!” said the boarding school boy.

“Oh yes,” she said, her voice gently mocking. “And you? How long has it been since you saw your good mother?”

“Five years, ten months. I wanted to go after the war finished, but there was a problem with the paperwork. And then Herr Seidel wrote to say I should stay and finish school.”

“Let me guess.” She lowered her voice to lend authority to the phrase. “
A young man is nothing without a good education
.”

“Yes, something like that. He even wanted me to stay the rest of the summer, saying that it was hard to get proper food in Vienna, and that the streets were full of riff-raff. But then I got another letter. This one came from Mother.”