The One I Was (25 page)

From the window I watched her stride across the snowy lawn and address Cathal. His arms spread in that familiar open-palmed gesture I remembered from years ago. He shook his head. Sarah gave him bank notes. He took them, but threw them onto the snow. She pulled a mobile phone out of her pocket. He stooped, picked up the money, and trudged off. Sarah watched him for a while, before turning back for the house.

‘I actually had to threaten him with the police before he’d go,’ she said, stamping on the doormat so that the snow could fall off her boots. ‘He was most peculiar.’ She flicked off her boots and hung up her coat, sounding unruffled but puzzled. ‘He was ranting on about all
kinds of nonsense. Claiming he should own the house. I almost felt sorry for him, but Benny is my main concern.’

She washed her hands under the tap and picked up her whisk, giving me a sharp look, warning me, perhaps, that Benny and his comfort would remain her priority.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that I’d lived here before.’

‘No particular reason why you should.’ But she still looked watchful.

‘I didn’t think I should take the job. But I did.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m still not sure. I liked the sound of Benny. The agency thought we’d get along. It seemed like a good time to return here, with a patient to look after.’

And distract me, if things became too intense.

She was still watching me.

‘I didn’t expect to feel so at home here,’ I went on. ‘Even though this once was my home. I thought I’d feel like an outsider. But I didn’t. And that’s because of you. And Benny.’

She nodded. ‘Whatever’s bothering him, see if you can help him with it.’

Her expression told me that this was the reason she was happy to have me in the house. She needed me to release Benny from the burden of whatever he was brooding over. I was his nurse and his welfare mattered more than anything to me.

30

I sat by Benny all night, dozing occasionally, but awake for most of the time. He slept better than he had in previous nights. I topped up his medication in the early hours and helped him drink some water. At five Sarah relieved me for a few hours. Benny was awake when went back to him at seven to give him more drugs and help him wash. ‘I heard voices on the lawn yesterday,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d dreamed it, but I don’t think I did. Who was it?’

I told him who the snow-sweeper had been. His eyes widened. ‘Cathal came here?’

‘Sarah saw him off.’

He gave a wry smile. ‘She’s quite fierce when she needs to be.’

‘Now you know all about me, about it all …’ I made an expansive gesture with my hand to express what it was he knew.

‘Yes. And I’m glad I do. I promised your grandmother …’

‘What did you promise Granny?’

‘That I’d always keep an eye on things here. That was way back before I owned Fairfleet. I took it to mean that I’d always take care of her family, too.’

‘But you were younger than her?’ Surely he’d just been a teenage boy during the war? Far younger than Granny. But then I remembered how young she’d been when she’d married her first husband, just nineteen.

‘I know. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? Presumptuous, almost. But things started to change between us as the war came to an end.’

And now the expression on his face was one I couldn’t interpret.

‘It was as though the age difference between us melted away. By the end of the war I was the last in the series of boys they’d waved off to promising futures. Perhaps it made me seem older than I was.’ He considered what he’d just said. ‘Perhaps both of us forgot that I wasn’t really very old at all.’

*

Rainer, David, Richard, Ernst, Paul. By this summer of 1945 all were now dispersed. Lord Dorner had pulled strings as boys of Jewish German origin were still regarded with suspicion. Rainer and David had joined up. Richard had gone to Germany, helping out with translation work in Hamburg with a British major rounding up suspected Nazis. Richard was older: nineteen. Still too young, Dr Dawes told Benny. For what he’d see and hear in Germany. But perhaps it would be useful to have one of their little group back over there, closer to the Red Cross and refugee organizations.

‘Perhaps Richard can find someone who knows what happened to your father, Benny,’ he said.

They were out in the walled garden this July morning, helping Lady Dorner with the gardening. Too beautiful a day to spend indoors, Dr Dawes said. And Benny had earned a break from studying.

Benny’s father, Josef Goldman. Josef Goldman had driven a shiny Mercedes and had dressed very smartly. He’d possessed one of those open faces that always look as if they’ve just smiled or are about to smile. Very far from being a hook-nosed, close-eyed Jew like those depicted in the propaganda.

‘He vanished into a camp very early on,’ Benny said. ‘Even before Kristallnacht.’ It all seemed an eternity away now.

Dr Dawes said nothing for a moment. Benny knew he was thinking that it was unlikely, impossible, that Herr Goldman could have survived. He’d be long dead, his body flung into some pit in Poland or scattered as ashes over some desolate field. But suppose he’d been one of the few who’d lived through the horror?

Suppose he traced his son through all the confusion of the diphtheria outbreak and the Kindertransport to England and came over to claim him? Benny pictured a man in his forties, but worn down by his terrible treatment and looking older, ill and weak, coming into the house, taking off his hat, looking round at the comfortable furniture and warm, if now somewhat threadbare, carpets. Heard him addressing Lady Dorner in stumbling English, explaining who he was.

‘I have come for my only son, Benjamin.’

Lady Dorner would take Josef Goldman into the drawing room and order tea. She’d call for Dr Dawes and ask him to tell his tutee, Benjamin Goldman, known here as Benny, that he was no orphan as might have been assumed, and would be leaving this very day with his father, who’d come back from near-death to claim him. A miracle.

Benny pictured Josef Goldman’s face when he saw the new, anglicized version of Benjamin Goldman and tried to find the young boy he’d loved in the seventeen-year-old’s features. It was warm in this walled garden, but goose-pimples formed on Benny’s arms. He swallowed hard.

‘Benny, I know it’s terrible for you to have all this raked up again.’ Dr Dawes’s hand was warm on his shoulder. He looked at Benny, soliciting a confidence. ‘If there’s anything I can do to help, you only have to ask.’

‘It’s the uncertainty.’ Benny tugged hard at a stem of couch grass in the flowerbed.

‘I know that’s the worst part of it. We’ve tried to distract you, to keep you occupied so you wouldn’t think about your families too much. Everyone said that was the best thing.
Perhaps it wasn’t.’ Dr Dawes’s eyes were sorrowful. ‘Perhaps we should have spoken more openly of the terrible losses you have all suffered.’

He’d really cared for the six of them, Benny thought. They hadn’t just been a wartime distraction from more interesting academic pursuits. For more than six years he’d taught and guided them. They’d been boys when they’d arrived at Fairfleet, but now they were young men. Dr Dawes had been strict, but had never once raised his hand to them. The worst any of them had had in punishment was an afternoon’s detention, or exclusion from a trip to the cinema.

At the time they’d taken his solicitude for granted, but now Benny wondered what it had cost him. Guiding six young men from an enemy culture, making Englishmen of them. Or trying to. Some of the older boys had proved too difficult to mould and would always be recognizably German, for all their conscription into the army and their educating in Britishness. They’d all go on to universities. Lord Dorner and Dr Dawes had made certain of this. But even then, the foreignness would stick to them, showing itself in the way they pronounced an ‘r’ or a ‘w’, or used their cutlery.

‘We’ve made good progress.’

Benny blinked. He’d forgotten Lady Dorner, standing in front of them, looking at him now, clasping a small garden trug containing garden tools. Probably wondering why he was staring into space.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was dreaming.’

‘You’re wise to take a break. It’s hot out here.’ She stooped to pick up clippings from the gravel path. ‘What are you planning for the summer, Benny? You have three months before you do your service, don’t you?’

He shrugged. ‘A cycling tour. The Cotswolds, perhaps. David says he’ll have a few days at home at some point. We could go together.’

‘Sounds fun.’ She started to pull out bindweed. Her fingers were long and strong, the nails manicured but unvarnished. He joined her. Bindweed pulling was more satisfying than tugging at couch grass. You thought you had just a small frond of the weed, but then you tugged it and saw you had a yard or more of the stuff in your hand.

‘Careful to get it out by the roots,’ she said. ‘Otherwise it just grows back again.’

‘I’ll leave you to carry on helping Lady Dorner, Benny.’ Dr Dawes sounded weary.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘If you could pick up the weeds and throw them into the wheelbarrow. I’m trying to get some of the flowers going again.’ Here and there a delphinium still lingered among the vegetables. Nobody had had time for flowers for years, but the scent of those that remained, and of mown grass, took Benny back to his childhood, to the summer afternoons when his mother had still been alive and had worked in their garden.

Harriet Dorner’s hands continued to move through the stalks, cutting, straightening, tying back. He could imagine those hands on the controls of a cockpit. They worked in silence for half an hour.

‘When we’ve finished here I should do something with the poor old topiary,’ she said. ‘I know we’ve done our best during the war, but I feel sorry for the beasts. They’ve lost all their shape.’ She laughed at herself. ‘I’m being silly.’

Benny could still just remember the box animals. The elephant with his raised trunk. The pig, the chicken and the fox. ‘Let’s have a look at them now,’ he said.

There must have been a note of urgency in his voice because she blinked. Perhaps he felt everything shifting, changing: the older boys leaving Fairfleet, himself just about to launch into adulthood. He needed to remind himself of how it had been when he’d first arrived here. But perhaps there was more. Perhaps he didn’t want this afternoon to end: Harriet Dorner and him, working together in the sunshine in companionable silence. Though there were many things he might have liked to say to her.

‘Come on then.’ She picked up the trug and followed him.

Over the last five or six years people had tried to maintain the shapes of the box beasts. Some had clearly been more gifted at topiary than others. The elephant might have been a cow. The fox had mutated into a kind of crocodile with a ruffle on its back. The chicken might have been anything: a lizard or a half-completed statue of a swan.

Harriet rolled her eyes, handing him a pair of secateurs. ‘Just do your best, Benny.’

He undid the secateurs and cut a few sprigs off the chicken’s back. Back before the war, he remembered, it had had outstretched wings. Hard to see how you could make a hen shape from the tangle of stems and small leaves. He cut a few more pieces away. That was better: the shape was smoother now. The aroma of clipped box tree was fresh and crisp.

Harriet was working on the elephant with hedging shears. ‘I can see his trunk again now.’ She sounded happy, absorbed in the task.

Benny cut more of the overgrown box tree and looked again at his work. He’d taken too much off around the chicken’s head, which had now lost its neck and shrunk into its body. The beak was overgrown and looked more like a propeller. He tried taking more off the sides of the body, but made matters worse: it looked too cylindrical now, not like a bird at all.

He looked at the shape in despair. Perhaps if he trimmed the growths on each side, the wings, the chicken’s head would look more in proportion. But when he’d finished the wings it didn’t resemble any kind of avian. It looked more look like an aeroplane. An idea came to him. He cut a few more sprigs, more quickly. Stood in front of the box bush and studied the shape he’d cut. It might be possible. The overgrown beak could in fact be a propeller. In his mind it was 1943 again. A plane was carving the pale blue sky, sun glinting on its wings.

Wings. Tail. Benny cut away. He was barely aware of Harriet now, until she came to stand beside him.

‘You’ve got it,’ she said, softly. ‘My beautiful Spitfire. Commemorated in a piece of box hedge.’

He closed the secateurs. She was circling the box shrub now, examining it from every side. ‘Just a little bit more off this side, I think, if you’re to get this port engine perfect.’

He reopened the secateurs and trimmed off more sprigs. He heard an intake of breath and stilled his hand, turning to look at her.

‘It’s nothing.’ She gave a shaky smile. ‘Just for a moment there I thought you were taking off too much.’ The golden tones in her complexion had turned milky white. ‘I couldn’t bear to see it spoiled.’ Still he was looking at her, not understanding.

‘A bad memory, that’s all.’ She stood straighter. He didn’t know what to say, wished he was older, wiser, more at ease talking to people like Harriet Dorner. She must have known bad things; male pilot friends who lost their lives flying missions, or even just accidents, engines failing, misjudgements.

‘It’s perfect.’ She touched his hand. ‘A wonderful testament to a wonderful plane. Sometimes I …’ She dismissed the thought with a shake of her head. ‘Thank you, Benny.’

All the things he wanted to say lumbered towards his mouth and tripped over one another and couldn’t be spoken.

‘I must go in now.’ She sounded clipped like Lord Dorner’s wife again. ‘I’ve got a friend coming to play tennis.’ She gave a little smile as she left. ‘Sounds almost like old times, doesn’t it? Don’t stay out here long.’

He raked the off-cuts on the grass together and fetched the wheelbarrow. The sun was hot as he wheeled the load to the compost heap. His head was pounding as he replaced the gardening tools in the shed and walked back to the house, skirting the topiary walk so that he wouldn’t have to see the Spitfire. Was Harriet Dorner laughing about it, about him, now with
her friend?
You’ll never guess what that funny boy has done now
. He kicked out at the roots of an old monkey puzzle tree.