The Facts of Life (14 page)

Edward’s work on
Job
was progressing well by now. Just before the ringing shattered their peace, she had been asking him about it and he had felt her recoil from his unglamorous choice of story. He had also felt her discreet dismay at the prospect of him undertaking such a large-scale work with no commission, not even advance promise of a performance.

‘Shouldn’t you stick to smaller, cheaper things to start with?’ she had asked, but she had gone to the telephone before he could answer, leaving him turning this unattractive piece of common sense indignantly over in his mind.

She must see that he could only write what he was moved to write? He would not, could not tailor his art to fit a household economy. He heard Sally talking in the hall, heard her steps on the uncarpeted stairs. As she circled the landing back to the bedroom, he was thinking scornfully to himself that if Brahms were still alive he would doubtless be working for the BBC composing incidental music for radio plays.

Sally pushed open the door and stood, a well-wrapped silhouette, against the light from the landing. He couldn’t make out her face. Her voice was hesitant, perplexed.

‘Edward? It’s a call from London. I didn’t quite understand, he had such an accent. Someone called Ivan? Ivan Airingson?’

‘Aaronson,’ Edward corrected her, jumping out of bed and pulling a jersey over his pyjamas for warmth. ‘A friend of Rosa and Isaac’s. You remember Rosa, surely? At the wedding?’

‘How could I forget?’

‘I’ll go and speak to him.’

‘Edward,’ she stopped him, a warning hand on his arm. ‘Darling. He thinks they’ve found a woman who might be your sister. Edward?’

He hurried past her, ignoring her protest. The hall floor was freezing beneath his bare feet. He took refuge on the rug by the piano.

‘
Ja, Ivan? Wie geht’s?
’

He noticed the bucket was full of rain water and needed emptying. By the time the conversation was over, Sally had come downstairs and was hunched up, worried, on the sofa, her knees tucked up before her. The water had started to trickle down the bucket’s edge. When he hung up, she simply held out her hands to him. He took them and she pulled him into a tight embrace. He heard himself sobbing as she ran feverish fingers across his back and up through his hair as though searching for the source of his hurt.

‘You must go,’ she said at last. ‘Where is she?’

‘Paris. In the suburbs,’ he said, thinking how innocuous that sounded. ‘I don’t think I could face it.’ A tear ran down over his upper lip with a little shock of salt.

‘You must. She’s your
sister
, Edward. Don’t be childish. You
must
go!’

‘We can’t possibly afford it.’

‘No. But Thomas can,’ she said simply. ‘He’d pay your fare. You know he would.’

It was impossible to sleep. He lay for hours with Sally curled in seemingly heartless slumber beside him. Repeatedly he started when it seemed to him that the low door to the barred room beside theirs had suddenly swung open in the blackness, releasing unimaginable horrors.

Far from being happily laid to rest by Sally’s redeeming love and the honouring of new family ties, the unquiet dead were thrusting back their tomb-lids. The nightmare had begun, or rather, the unquiet dream that had started years before was now becoming a reality, rattling forth from his subconscious to cavort in baldest sunlight. Shut his eyes, clamp tight his mouth, halt his own progress as he might, the evil continued unstoppably around him. And so, the following day, he found himself back in the quiet, glistening
chic
of Thomas’s study, pushing aside friendly enquiries about the opera’s progress with a blunt request for money.

He had been in England for over a decade without leaving. He had grown used to her great tracts of uncultivated countryside which reeked of immobile privilege, her bland unvarying food and the pervasive insincerity of good manners. It was only as the ferry juddered out through the drizzle on to a brown, untrustworthy sea that he appreciated how efficient a shelter England had been for him. However much her natives strove against it – with their incomprehensible traditions, private languages and cheerfully confessed mistrust of all that was foreign – he had become a party to the island’s mentality.

The Continent, of which his English hosts spoke as a place of inefficiency, bad smells, worse water and insidious, dangerous seductiveness, embraced him like a neglected but forgiving friend. He had forgotten the frank odours, good and bad, of crude cigarettes and bodies, the nakedly assessing stares, the sudden shifts from shrugging unconcern to
bonhomie
. Waiting to board the train to Paris, he made an instinctive, fetishistic collection of the most Continental things he could find: a packet of Gauloises, a paper-wrapped sandwich of crisp French bread and garlic sausage, a buttery pastry oozing crème patissière and a magazine dripping scandal.

The cigarettes were a mistake, of course. His lungs were in a better state when he had last smoked and one drag left him wet-eyed and helplessly coughing. The other self-indulgences were all too soon exhausted and he had a long journey on the stopping train from Calais to Paris, then across the city and out into the grimy suburb to a hospital which held a woman who might be his sister. A long journey in which to think and to worry.

He had known there was a network of more or less unofficial Jewish agencies operating across Europe. Ironically, the effects of Nazi propaganda had made a reality of malicious lies, although the Jewish purpose was not world domination but the innocent desire to keep in touch. Built from the remains of large, now splintered families and numerous Resistance cells, and wringing what grudging co-operation they could from post-war governments keen to sweep the recent horrors aside, these agencies went about the Sisyphean task of tracing survivors and putting them in touch with lost family. Ivan Aaronson did a certain amount of research for them at the British and German ends – under the cover of his import/export business. It was Ivan who had come to Edward’s internment camp to confirm that Edward’s parents had been traced to their end. Ivan himself was free to come and go, having taken out British citizenship, like Isaac, some time before in the early thirties.

‘But we can’t find Miriam,’ he had confessed, wizened brow wrinkling further with distress at his own helplessness. ‘They don’t keep all families together, you see. She may have been separated for another purpose.’

‘She may have got married,’ Edward suggested, clutching at straws. ‘She was seeing a … a
goy
when she last wrote to me. Lorenz’s family were rich, well connected – he may have helped her.’

‘Maybe,’ Ivan said. ‘Maybe.’

But no record of a marriage was traced. Or of a death. And with the war and its bombings many such records had gone up in smoke, reducing personal histories to chaos.

Someone who might be Miriam had at last been found in a psychiatric hospital. By a long, drawn-out process as complicated as the demonic bureaucracy which had engulfed her to start with, a tattoo on her arm had been traced to those given at one of the camps. Records still existed to show who had died there and who had lived to tell the tale. Some of the survivors had obsessively retentive memories for names and family details of fellow inmates; details they intoned, rehearsed, perfected as a puny defence against the systematic destruction of all else that made them human. Those who, like the woman who might be Miriam, were too ill to speak, had to be presented to a succession of hopeful, dreading families. Edward’s family was one of the last possibilities in her case. With both parents dead, the search for her family had not been widespread, until someone, a former colleague of his mother’s from Tübingen now working in Versailles, remembered the boy sent away to England and Ivan was contacted.

‘We are not certain she is your Miriam,’ Ivan told him on the telephone, ‘She … Apparently she is not responsive.’

Time and again since then, Edward’s mind had examined the phrase, wondering just what degree of horror the cool words ‘not responsive’ might veil.

The slow train shuddered into another drab suburban station with another pompous name honouring another long-forgotten battlefield. Crossing the short platform, Edward turned up his collar against the drizzle. He was the only passenger to get off. Pale faces stared out at him with bored impudence as the carriages were dragged out again. He summoned his schoolboy French to ask for directions from a station official, but had to ask a passing man a few streets later because his unpractised ear had only retained a third of what it heard.

The hospital was not unlike a French school, with a small courtyard dotted with some sad trees and a bench or two. There were a few cars parked there. One could tell at a second glance that this was a human scrapheap, not an institution where lives were fought for and heroic recoveries made. This was a place where lost causes were fed, clothed, maintained to no purpose but the satisfying of medical and ethical honour. Sure enough, a small brass plaque by the entrance confessed with Gallic candour that this was
La Retraite St Martin de Tours, Hôpital des Incurables
.

The place was strangely quiet. As a blue-robed nurse-nun hybrid led him up several flights of stairs and along a long corridor, Edward entertained the fantasy that his sister might be the sole patient; helpless queen bee of a near-deserted hive. He had braced himself for moans, wracked coughing, the clatter of hysterically rejected bed pans, but found instead a silence broken only by the occasional mournful sneeze or murmur. He might have been in a scrupulously hygienic library. By way of a meagre concession to the season, a few Christmas decorations had been set up. A scrawny tree was hung with a few faded Christmas cards. Some irregularly cut paper stars had been pinned to patient’s doors in unconscious parody of backstage tradition.

‘
Regardez, Madame. Il y’a quelqu’un
,’ said the nurse, breezing into a small room and tidying the bed with a few practised twitches of her small hands. ‘
Votre frère, je crois
.’

She left them alone. There were bars on the window. Edward instinctively walked over to touch their cold metal before turning to look back at the bed. His first reaction was of tremendous relief mixed with irritation. He had come all this way, suffered all this anxiety, for nothing!

Miriam was slender and had long, brown hair, glossy and ringleted. The woman in the bed had a clumsy crop, and her hair was shot through with grey. She was also immensely fat, her eyes reduced to two black dimples in a complexion of slack, off-white dough, her mouth a girlish rosebud on an old face.

‘Er.
Pardonnez-moi, Madame
,’ he muttered. ‘
Je ne veux pas vous déranger. On avait tort
.’

He threw her a desperate smile and turned to go, but his hand had scarcely touched the door handle than he became aware of a hoarse, effortful sound coming from the bed. He turned to find the gross, immobile face contorted by an attempt to speak. As her mouth worked and brows furrowed, the little, sunken eyes turned on his, beseeching as a dog’s. She lifted a great, pale arm, like something from a butcher’s window, to reach out, then let it fall on the blankets as if the inappropriately delicate hand at its end were too heavy to raise. He glimpsed the tattooed digits on her tender underarm skin. They had blurred slightly like writing splashed with tears. She might only have been asking for a bedpan but he turned back swiftly and took the seemingly proffered hand in his.

‘
Ehh
,’ she kept wheezing. ‘
Ehh
–.
Ehh
–.’

Then he saw it. For a moment, when she frowned with concentration, there was a flash of Miriam’s pretty crossness, a small petulance no sooner recognised than smothered in fat.

‘Miriam?’ he asked. ‘
Meine Liebe
?’

‘
Ehh –. Ehh
–.’

‘Eli,’ he prompted her and a nervous laugh burst from him. ‘Eli. I must have changed a lot. I can hardly speak German any more, I’m so out of practice.’

Now she sank back on her pillows with a relieved sigh, as though beaten to the solution of a brainteaser, and released the only words he would hear her say. It was a shock hearing his childhood name given its German pronunciation again.

‘
Eli
,’ she said then, with an unmistakably sarcastic turn to her lips, she added, ‘
Bruderlein
.’

She gave a slight return of pressure on his hand and answered his stare for a moment with – perhaps he was being fanciful? – something like affection. Then it was as though the familiar face had slipped away from his reach, back beneath the surface of an impenetrably gloomy pool. Once again he was in a room with an unrecognisable, somnolent, grossly fat stranger. The difference was that now he knew his sister was trapped inside her somewhere. No. Not trapped. Hiding.

He kissed the pale hand, noticing for the first time that the top joint of her ring finger had been cut off. Her rings had gone. She used to wear two. He tried to hide his disgust. He looked back at her face. It was hard now to believe she had spoken at all. Had he imagined it, unable to face the alternative?

‘What did they
do
?’ The doctor, a faded young man, who hid his bad teeth with an unsmiling manner, scornfully ground out his cigarette in a full ashtray. Smoke wreathed about the bronze Christ that hung, lifeless, on a crucifix on his cluttered desk. ‘Believe me, you wouldn’t want to know, Monsieur.’