Authors: Polly Samson
Julian laughed to find Karl still making excuses for going into research. It seemed the world, or at least his doctor father, would forever wag a finger at this decision. Julian remembered Heino Lieberman as kindly, with mischievous eyes. It was hard to imagine he had ever been angry with his son. They once stopped off from university, some gig or other at the Town and Country. Karl’s parents lived right by Great Ormond Street Hospital, a convenient resting place for him and Karl that night. They passed the entrance to the hospital on their way back from the gig. ‘Up there’s where my dad mends hearts,’ Karl said, resting his hand to his own as they passed.
The Liebermans’ flat was above a florist. It was spacious and warm with red runners to several floors. Heino and Ellie were a handsome couple, he with the eyebrows and she, Karl’s twitching smile.
Karl’s meatballs and noodles remained mostly untouched. He was still talking about his Capgras research and it occurred to Julian that it had been years since he’d seen him without a girlfriend. He paused with the fork to his mouth to ask after the last girl. Birgitte? Sofie? What
was
her name?
Karl pulled a face and changed the subject. ‘Moving to Connecticut couldn’t have come at a worse moment.’
‘Connecticut?’
‘Yes, I told you, you weren’t listening. I’m being drafted back to my original research, but now funding is coming out of America. So, the deal is I go and run it from there.’
Julian stopped with the glass halfway to his lips, horrified. ‘But we’ll see you even less than we do now,’ he said.
Karl clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Well, for better or worse, I’ll be constantly back and forth. Since mum died my dad has become a bit more needy.’
‘I’m so sorry about your mum,’ Julian said. ‘I thought she was lovely that time I met her.’ He remembered the night Ellie died and Karl ringing Cromwell Gardens from the hospital: Julia in the kitchen handing him the phone, a heavy sigh, her hand to her belly. The baby due any day. Karl’s ratcheting sobs.
‘It was a horrible way to die. I’m sorry I wasn’t much of a shoulder to cry on at the time,’ Julian said and Karl waved away the apology.
‘It’s just my dad’s going to be a bit of a long-distance problem, from now on. From Connecticut, I mean.’
‘Isn’t there any way you can do this work in London?’
‘No. And, well, there are other good reasons for me to go.’ Karl tapped his nose, and Julian thought: Aha, so a woman
is
involved.
‘Father won’t have the word “carer” mentioned in his presence. To be honest it hasn’t got that bad, but since Mum died he sleepwalks and I can’t have him wandering out into the street, so I need to work out some sort of rota of people to stay overnight at Lamb’s Conduit Street. I’ve got the weekends sorted because my cousin’s daughter Claudine wants to be in London with her boyfriend, but she has to be back at York from Tuesday to Friday.’
Julian put down his glass and tugged Karl’s arm.
‘You’re looking for someone to stay overnight three nights a week? Is that it?’ His voice was rising with excitement. ‘Midweek, right?’ He couldn’t imagine why Karl hadn’t thought of it already. It was the obvious solution: Julia.
Julian still hasn’t managed to get out of bed and his mum is back. ‘Julian, are you OK?’ He hears her sniff as she enters. ‘Have you been smoking dope?’
‘Get out, get out!’ And, for once, she goes. He groans into his pillow, grinds himself into the jumper that Julia had shed like an old skin. Who was she, this monster? Perhaps he was suffering from Capgras himself. Karl should have offered him the cure. He sees Julia rising in all her fury from her sea of blankets and sheets. He sees the unknown lace strap of her imposter’s nightgown, wide at her shoulder where her wild hair snakes, and the words that fall from the black hole of her mouth make no sense to him.
Julia’s room at Heino Lieberman’s was beside the sitting room. The sash windows that looked on to Lamb’s Conduit Street rattled whenever an ambulance went by and from the bathroom across the hall you could see down into the florist’s yard.
The flat was arranged on three floors. Once you came up the stairs beside the flower shop and through the front door, it had the air of a slightly grand townhouse, with china push plates on the doors and red Turkish runners up the stairs, pictures and books lining the walls. The light was muted by voiles at the tall windows to the street, but there were plenty of lamps. The smell of the place was somehow familiar to Julian: lavender, face powder, old paper, wax, lint, peppermint. Something like the inside of his mother’s handbag and strongest where he stood with Julia and Heino in the doorway of what was to be Julia’s room.
‘The bed was put in for Ellie when she could no longer manage the stairs. Before that it was her music room, with the piano for her students,’ Heino said, leaning on his stick and momentarily closing his eyes. Julia reached for his hand.
‘Come,’ Heino led her inside like a bride to the altar. The light was gentle, the wallpaper sprigged with violets, there was a sheen to a bronze satin eiderdown, lace-edged linen folded over on a queen-size bed. Beside the window, a small day bed where Ellie’s nurse had sometimes slept, sheets neatly stacked at one end. Heino waved his stick at it. ‘Bring your little daughter, won’t you? She will be able to sleep there,’ he said.
Heino was much as Julian remembered him from his visit with Karl, though a little more bent over, and the stick was new. It was of dark polished wood, a single carved snake winding towards the handle. Heino followed his eyes. ‘My Aesculapian staff,’ he said, waving the handle at him. ‘The God of medicine and healing. Karl had it made for me and I’ve rather taken to it.’ His way of speaking was precise, his German accent slight and most detectable in the word ‘God’, which he pronounced ‘Got’.
Heino motioned to the sitting room. ‘Make yourselves comfortable while I fetch the coffee.’ Julia perched on the edge of a winged armchair, looking around. Some of the paintings were surprisingly modern, above the fireplace a large abstract of orange and green, towering bookcases, a baby grand piano in the corner. Julian sat on a sofa and leant across to a sepia photograph in a small leather frame on a side table. A distinguished-looking couple stood shoulder to shoulder.
‘I remember now,’ Julian said, holding it so Julia could see. The man had a walrus moustache and lavish eyebrows, his wife a face as neat as a mouse, a froth of lace at her collar.
‘These are Heino’s grandparents. They didn’t make it out of Germany, neither did his father. Heino and his siblings came to London on the Kindertransport . . .’ He stopped talking as Heino brought the coffee in its tall bone-china pot, the cups and saucers clattering, and Julia jumped up to take the tray from him.
‘Thank you, my dear,’ he said, reclaiming his stick and levering himself into his chair.
Karl had warned them that his father might be a little taciturn but he was grace itself, eyes intent on Julia, resting his white cup of black coffee on his knee.
‘Tell me again what it is you do, my dear,’ he asked her. ‘Karl mentioned something about indoor gardens, but I couldn’t really follow.’
Julia told him about Arbour: ‘I design outside spaces for the indoors. Mainly in offices.’
‘And the plants do well?’ he enquired in such a doctorly fashion that Julian snorted.
‘It’s astonishing how much success you can have, even with trees, if you get the irrigation and light right. And Freda, my partner, is a brilliant plantswoman. We try to run everything from timers and we remove anything the moment it’s sickly.’
Heino was finding it impossible not to stare at her, a feeling Julian knew all too well. His coffee remained untouched. ‘I would like to see one of your gardens,’ he said. She leant across and told him he was welcome to come along in the van anytime.
‘Your wife is very beautiful,’ he said, good manners demanding that he turn his attention to Julian, who at that moment had been caught by a portrait on the piano. He nodded to it. ‘Yours too, Heino. I thought so, very much, when I met her.’
Julia followed their gaze to the silver frame and she jumped, seemingly startled by the sight of Karl’s mother. Ellie was young and lovely, with a graceful curve of neck and upswept hair.
Julia got to her feet, walked to the piano. ‘We must go, now, I’m afraid,’ she announced, tapping her wrist, though she never wore a watch. ‘We need to get the next train back or we’ll miss Mira’s bedtime.’
She became brisk, arranging her return for after the weekend. ‘Let me get you keys,’ Heino said, and she offered him her arm when he bowed forward to stand. ‘No, it’s OK,’ he said, smiling up at her. ‘Not such an old cripple yet.’ He tapped his way to his desk, took the keys with their leather fobs from a drawer and handed a set to each of them.
It’s a mighty mental effort for Julian to shut the door on Lamb’s Conduit Street – he doesn’t want to think for another moment about her there. He’s still a little stoned from those few puffs on the joint, and hungry. He comes downstairs to an empty house. There’s a note on the kitchen table from his mother; they’ve gone shopping in Woodford and then on to Sue’s for lunch. She’s left him courgette soup, which he slurps lukewarm from the pan. Zeph nudges him with his nose and there’s solace in stroking his silky ears. The air is a little cooler today: there is even a breeze. It would be a good day for striking out across to the Mill to see Raph, but he’s halted by the sudden peace of finding himself alone. Even the birds sound less harried, something’s singing a syrupy song.
He thinks of a battered tin coffee pot that looked more ancient than its owner, enamelled brown inside from the constant brew. This coffee pot suspended from a tripod that straddled a fire and Raph waiting on the step of his lorry with a china mug in his hand. In repose he looked troubled, but when he smiled his eyes disappeared into the friendliest crinkles.
In the heat of the day Raph went shirtless and shoeless, his combat shorts hanging low, their baggy pockets weighted down with tools and tricks. His muscular body was brown as ancient terracotta, etched with the fine blue-black of his tattoos. A gracefully drawn dove dipped her wings over one bicep, an olive branch in her mouth, and, more intriguingly, a series of tiny interlocking hearts spread from the left side of his chest, across his shoulder and down, like hundreds of petals falling from his heart, each with a man’s name at its centre. He refused to tell Julian who they were. Some were hard to read with the dips between his muscles as he moved about. His back was covered by a mighty pair of wings, every feather exquisitely inked, so they rippled as he moved.
The wings were first, Raph told him. Just before he joined the Royal Navy he’d met an artist, a girl from the Slade, who could only get work in a tattoo parlour. The wings were her goodbye present to him.
When he left the forces, Nell, the girl who gave him his wings, became his wife. The hearts were Nell’s second goodbye present, just before he took to the road. The mysterious names were inked in tiny script: Matias, Tomas, Santiago, Juancho, Marcelo, Felipe, Kiko, Ricardo.
How lovely they were, those long summer nights: the words and the silences, the sunsets and the stars. Raph sitting on his step teaching him card tricks and to roll a coin across his knuckles, to light a fire without matches, to trust the universe.
He stands at the small bookcase to consult with the netsuke monkey, resists the lure of the window seat. Perhaps today you’ll do some work, the monkey says.
But his thoughts have stuck with Raph. The last time he saw him was the night Firdaws was lost.
‘You’re young. There will be other places,’ Raph said then, as they sat, poking sticks and making sparks of the embers.
He must have gone on about Julia in too much detail. He remembers Raph holding up his hands to make him stop: ‘OK. She’s fabulous to look at and hot in the sack. I get it.’
And Raph shaking his head at him, saying: ‘I thought you were meant to be working for your finals, huh? I’m not sure you should let this animal lust rule your mind like this.’
‘Of course it’s not just sex,’ Julian said.
They stayed talking like that long after the fire died. When it was time to leave Raph laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Your love for this Julia coming at the same time as losing your family home, that’s heavy,’ he said. ‘But be strong my friend, live happy and love well. There’s plenty out there for you to learn, not all of it at university. But looking at the state you’re in, I’d say be careful with this Julia. Especially if she’s as beautiful as you say. But, you know, keep your wits about you, study hard, write your book.’
Julian looks again at his scraps of paper, at the sea of his desk choppy with Post-its. He had started scribbling this thing the moment he returned from that moonless flit, had continued with it until sunrise and then all the way back on the train to Julia, safe, he hoped, from the ire of her husband behind Mrs Briggs’s sturdy front door.
He rereads a couple of the Post-its, sits down with his head in his hands. Some scraps have fallen from the bookshelves, a couple of sheets of old notes from between the pages of the Milton. They are yellowing, folded in two, the perforations from where they’d been torn from a jotter grown brittle, his tiny script. A few words, a couple of sentences, catch his eye. A small jolt turns to a wave of recognition as he reads.
He remembers sketching it out at Mrs Briggs’s, the gin bottle beside him egging him on, a ring-bound notebook that he’d taken to carrying around in his pocket since the idea had taken grip in the maelstrom of meeting Julia and losing Firdaws.