The Sea House (6 page)

11

‘So how was your lesson?’ Gertrude asked Alf. ‘How was Miss Cheese?’ Alf stood before her. ‘Still no progress?’ she prompted, and then to her surprise he raised his hands and began fluttering his fingers, trilling them over a set of imaginary keys. He sped over the ivory, up and down and back again in a rolling crescendo of sound. She could almost hear the high notes, tinkling on a hairline creak, and then the ricochet of thunder as he boomed down to the far end. Gertrude was so taken aback that she leant too far over on her lounger, upending it so that her books slid on to the grass.

‘Well, I… that’s wonderful.’ She started clapping. It was the first sign of life she’d seen in him since the storm. ‘Come and sit down.’ She patted the space vacated by her books. ‘So you’re enjoying your lessons now?’ Tentatively he perched beside her. ‘I’m very pleased.’ She looked at him, his hair as white as butter, so bright it shone, and she thought of the small boy she had cared for in the war nursery, the boy whose mother had said she wouldn’t ever visit if he cried.

‘Mustn’t cry, mustn’t cry,’ he’d muttered, clinging to a shred of blanket, ‘mustn’t cry,’ until slowly, over the weeks and months, this instruction fixed itself so tightly inside him that there was nothing left of it but a little nervous smile.

‘Alf?’ She touched his arm, but he was restless, tensed to be away. ‘Go on, then.’

Alf sprang up. He skidded to the edge of the garden, slipped through the hedge and was gone.

Gertrude went back to her book. She was reading about children’s nightmares, their fear of the dark, and how one boy had been told the bogeyman would get him if he touched himself in bed. But what no one seemed to understand about the boy, and why he was still afraid, was that the bogeyman was already there in his imagination, so he might as well go on.

It was hot. Too hot for early June. Gertrude forced herself up and into the house, shivering in that moment of near blindness as she stepped in out of the sun. She felt her way into the kitchen and, running the tap for coldness, she glanced sideways at Max’s canvas still turned against the wall. It had been a week since the picture had been started, and just as long since work on it had stopped. Now her guest slipped out before breakfast, and did not come home again until late. If she wanted to talk to him, she had to wander through the village, peer round corners, traipse down lanes until she found him, perched on an old milking stool, wrapped in a paint-splattered smock. He’d taken to wearing a felt hat, old and brown and dented on the top, and he sat, oblivious to opinion, surrounded by his roll of lining paper, his paints and brushes, his palettes and his pots. He’d painted five houses now, and he was on to the sixth. They were intricately done, the bricks in all their shades of reddened clay, the pantile roofs, the thatches, the gardens and the trees. How many buildings were there in the village? she wondered, and as she started to calculate she realized he’d be here until next spring.

‘When I die,’ Kaethe had said to her, trying to smile as if it were hypothetical, a meandering conversation between friends, ‘I worry that Max will be…’ – she tried to breathe, but the breath came only as a rasp – ‘that he’ll be lost.’

Gertrude had squeezed her hand. ‘I’m sure…’ But Gertrude had no idea what would happen to Max. In all the years of her and Kaethe’s friendship he’d always held himself aloof. From her. From everyone. He’d used his deafness, she was sure of it, to keep himself apart.

‘Max likes to do things for people,’ Kaethe went on. ‘He painted all day and half the night because it pleased our father, and then when he came to England he stopped, really just for me. If no one asks him to do anything, I worry that he’ll…’ Kaethe’s voice cracked and she turned her face away.

‘I’ll invite him to the country.’ Gertrude smiled. ‘Ask him to do a painting of my house.’

‘Yes.’ Kaethe nodded, releasing her hand, exhausted. ‘That’s it. Then he can do something for you.’

But Kaethe had been wrong about her brother. No one had asked Max to paint the whole of Steerborough. No one understood why he was even there, muddling up the traffic on the village’s one street, peering through windows, examining borders, choosing which house or cottage would be next. He’d painted Molly Cross’s cat, enticing it with scraps, throwing crumbs of cake to keep it still, and then at the last minute he’d turned it from black to ginger just so it would stand out to more effect against the hedge. He’d painted the wasteland behind the Woollards, the village’s one disgrace, hens and bedsprings and old bicycles rusting away in nettles three feet high. There was even Mrs Stoffer’s poster for her production of
Twelfth Night
, pinned up outside the shop, and in tiny letters he had painted the time, the date and the fact that Mrs Stoffer had taken on the unsuitable role of Olivia herself.

Gertrude trickled water down over her face. Was it that her guest had overstayed his welcome? Or was it actually that he was never there? She stood still, testing her responses, listening to her breathing and her pulse. She looked at herself in the mirror and her face softened as she smiled. Yes, it was much as she suspected. She didn’t mind him staying, it was simply galling to be in the company of someone who needed so little of her help.

That night Max dreamt that he was measuring. He was measuring the grounds at Heiderose, scribbling the results on a piece of paper that continually blew away, and then, just when he had finished, had pocketed his notes, he’d found himself surrounded by a family pushing their way through his front door. A mother, large and ruffled, and four children with tow-coloured hair. Their father stood beside a car, unloading boxes. ‘I was just measuring,’ Max informed them, but no one saw him, no one noticed he was there.

Max sat late over his breakfast. He felt wound through with weariness, unable to control the page of Henry’s letter trembling in his hand.

‘Is it your day off?’ Gertrude asked him, and she sat down and poured herself some tea.

‘Yes,’ Max said, as if the thought had just occurred to him, ‘I think it may be.’ He laid his letter down beside his plate.

‘Important news?’ she asked, and Max very solemnly scooped the first page up and pressed it on her.

It seems scarcely worth doing
, the letter started,
as the discussion must have been set out more than a hundred times, but in my opinion the definition of Art is simply the way impressions are received and assimilated from the world outside
. Gertrude looked up to catch Max’s eye, but he had turned away.
Of course it is interesting to consider whether certain artists choose the right art in which to express themselves. Or by what peculiar gift, or train of events, anybody came to choose a particular form of art. But in my opinion the important thing is that you keep on. I expect if you left off swimming for long enough you would find your muscles were stiff. And if you left off drawing, the head, the hand, the eye would get rusty. If you left off long enough, you might find you couldn’t start again. But having said that, I know a man who drew, not very well, but in an interesting way, and then he went out to a farm in South America for six or seven years, and when he came back he started drawing again. I suppose he couldn’t help it.

Cuthbert Henry
, she read. ‘Yes, I saw a show of his once. Is he still…?’

But Max was pointing to the date.
May 15th 1938
.

‘I see…’ 1938 was on the other side of history. A time when you could assume men, grown silent, were at least still alive. ‘So how are your muscles? Are they very rusty?’

‘Yes.’ He smoothed the letter with such tenderness it gave his face a kind of glow. ‘I’ve been in South America for very many years.’

The invitation was looped around with violets, the words formed in such elegant calligraphy they resembled lace.

‘I know it’s rather short notice.’ Klaus Lehmann stood at the front door. ‘But if you have nothing else planned?’

‘No,’ Gertrude said. ‘We’d be delighted.’

‘In that case, we can expect you tomorrow?’ And he nodded to her and walked back down the lane.

Gertrude examined the card. A woman with not enough to do, she thought, and she put the card in pride of place beside the clock.

Gertrude waited to see if Max would notice it. He came in at seven, just as the light began to change, sweeping long shadows across the ermine lawn. ‘Have you had a good day?’ she asked him, and, not seeming to hear her, he set down his scroll, his leather case, his bag of paints, and walked over to the mantelpiece like a man pulled by a rope.
Mrs Elsa Lehmann requests the pleasure of Max and Gertrude at a lunch to be eaten in the garden
.

Max turned. His face was still and questioning and it occurred to her he was about to ask permission to go.

‘I’ve already accepted,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Yes.’ Max shook his head. ‘I mean no.’ He laughed at the confusion. No. He didn’t mind.

The Lehmanns lived in the lopsided house on the corner of Mill Lane. It was the glass and wooden building Max had marvelled at on his first day, with one steep side, dark wood and frosted glass. Below the slope, like a garden plateau, was the terrace with its picket fence, and there on the terrace, looking out, was Elsa, a hat held to her head. When she saw them, she took her hat off and waved, and then almost as suddenly she disappeared from view. She reappeared to open the side gate and, taking Max’s hand, she led him triumphantly into the garden, where under a triangle of trees the table was laid for lunch. There were flowers twisted round each place mat, petals floating in the centre on a plate, and, as Max turned to her, he could see just from the shape her mouth made that it was German she was about to speak.

‘Hello, welcome.’ Klaus was striding out of the house, and Elsa’s face closed up again, her mouth swallowing the words. ‘Come and look around, will you?’ Klaus put a hand on Max’s arm, and Elsa nodded to him. ‘Bitte,’ she said just under her breath as Klaus ushered him away.

The house didn’t smell of Heiderose, exactly, but it smelt familiar just the same. The same oil that they used to polish the furniture, could that be it, that made this house smell like every other German home? He stood there for a moment, until he realized Klaus was waiting for him to speak. ‘Yes, yes, most unusual,’ he said, waking from a sort of dream, and he followed his host across to the open staircase, light rippling between each laddered step. Upstairs, he glanced into a bedroom, a white rug spread on golden hardwood tiles, and then out they went on to the terrace, where, just as he’d suspected, there was a high blue stripe of sea.

‘Hiddensee.’ Gertrude leant in towards Max. ‘Was it an island? This place where you and Elsa… never met?’

Max nodded, and to draw the place towards him he closed his eyes. Hiddensee. His sea-horse of an island, its narrow tail and ridged rock of a head.

‘Vitte.’ Elsa formed the word, and he realized he’d had his eyes closed for too long. ‘I’m almost sure I know which house.’ They all turned to watch Elsa as she bit into her lip. Her face was like a mirror, her eyes a map, and Max sat suspended as he waited for her to travel the length of the longest street and come upon his house. ‘Was it near the bakery?’ she said then, and, stretching her hands out like a psychic, ‘There was a pear tree, a huge pear tree, growing outside.’

Max closed his eyes again as the house swam into his view and he could feel her across the table from him, like the secret member of a club.

‘Is she right? Was there a pear tree?’ Gertrude was impatient. ‘Outside Vitte?’

‘No, no,’ Klaus joined in. ‘Vitte was the village. The houses there didn’t have names. Isn’t that so, my El?’

‘Just marks,’ Max spoke up. ‘Each fisherman had a mark, which they scored into the wall.’ With his finger Max drew an X on the tablecloth. He traced a line across the top of it, and added a tiny squiggle to one toe. It dented for a second and was gone. Klaus took a pen and a notebook from his pocket and slid them across to Max.

‘Go on,’ he said, ‘you’re the artist.’

The pen was smooth to hold, the black ink soft as wine. The signs rolled out. X’s and Z’s with forks and tongues and roofs, A’s and R’s with twists and swirls. There was one sign like a flash of lightning and another like a horse. He’d made a study once of all the Vitte house signs, and now to his surprise they came crowding back.

‘You’d think’ – Gertrude examined them – ‘that it would be easier to learn to read and write.’

Very carefully Max drew a flat-headed A, with what looked like a hangman’s arm. ‘This was our house. It belonged to a fisher family called Gau.’ Helga, he thought, but he didn’t say her name. ‘And yes,’ he looked at Elsa, ‘we were beside the bakery.’ He had a vision of his governess balancing a towering box of cake. ‘We shared the house. The Gaus, they had one half, and we lived in the sunnier side of it, behind a dividing door.’

‘Didn’t you wonder,’ Elsa asked, ‘if they moved into your rooms once you were gone?’

‘Elsa!’ Klaus looked at her. And Gertrude laughed.

‘The strange thing is’ – Max shook his head – ‘I never once thought of it till now.’

‘Well,’ Gertrude suggested, ‘maybe that was the agreement. They just rented out those rooms for the summer.’

‘We always thought of it as ours…’ But Max had never dreamt about it. And his parents hadn’t sacrificed themselves to keep it for his return.