Authors: Eliza Graham
‘I don’t mind rissoles.’
She banged a saucepan as though suggesting that it didn’t really matter whether he minded or not. When the meal was finished he wandered down to the lake and lay down on the jetty. A thin haze obscured the stars tonight, but it was already dissolving. As he watched, the stars seemed to sharpen. Nobody knew Benny was down here. He felt his isolation like a stab in the ribs: he might be the last person left on the planet. In just months he’d be away from Fairfleet and there’d be many moments of isolation like this when nobody would know what he was doing or even care, not even Dr Dawes, who’d be returning at last to his beloved university libraries.
The lake suddenly felt unbearable, as if it were thousands of miles away from the rest of humanity. He stood up and went inside. Even if the only other person in the house was Alice Smith, it was better than being out here alone on the jetty.
Too hot to go to bed yet. He stood at the open bedroom window. The tobacco plants that Harriet had sewn along the beds by the house emitted a sweetness that again took Benny back to a time before the war, before his mother had died. Had she grown tobacco plants in her garden too?
Two white lights appeared at the end of the drive, telling him the Dorners were on their way home. He sat on the bed, listening to the sound of the car coming closer, then its doors closing, the front door opening. Lord Dorner’s deep voice asking his wife if she’d like a nightcap, her turning down the offer, Harriet exclaiming at Alice Smith still being up, and no, they didn’t need anything to eat or drink, thank you. All was quiet again. The flowers seemed to emit even more scent and Benny could see himself back in the garden on a summer night with his mother, when he’d been Rudi, not Benny.
Rudi. A name he hadn’t dared speak, even to himself. Letting himself be Rudi was risky; it dragged too many secrets into the present. If he hadn’t gone to the railway station, if he’d stayed in Germany as Rudi Lange, where would he be now? A corpse buried in the ground somewhere between Berlin and Moscow, like all those boys his age who’d only been seventeen in the last months but had stood between the Soviets and the capital? Failing that, he’d be in a prisoner-of-war camp somewhere on the Steppe. No smelling the flowers at midnight for Rudi Lange.
Too dangerous to muse on this. He turned to see Harriet standing in his doorway in her evening dress. Something of Rudi must have still lingered on his features. She blinked at him.
‘Benny? Are you all right? You look … different, somehow.’
He tried to return to Benny, to the cool, contained, persona of Benny, Benny who’d mastered English so completely and was planning to shine at university.
‘I was just remembering things.’
‘So much to remember.’ She closed the door and came to stand beside him at the window. He felt the danger. Was she going to ask him something about his childhood? ‘I wonder how we’re all going to know which bits of the past to remember and which bits to let go.’
‘What do you mean?’ He sounded sharp to his own ears. Had she read his mind, seen the projections of Rudi pass across it?
‘There are some parts of the last six years I want to store in my mind for ever. There are other parts I never want to think about again.’ She looked at him. ‘You know about that crash. I don't think about it any more. What’s the point, I ask myself?’
He, too, emphatically wanted to forget his last ever scene as Rudi: in that railway station in 1939 with the weeping parents.
Harriet was still standing close to him. The scent she wore was different from what she’d worn earlier today: earthier and more sophisticated, both at the same time. The hairs on his arms stood up.
‘Benny, there’s something I need to ask you –’
No. He couldn’t let her ask questions. She’d have it all out of him. He’d be exposed. In a panic he pulled her to himself.
‘Benny!’ Her eyes were wide. He’d ruined everything, she wasn’t interested, what had happened earlier in the summer was just a moment of passing kindness. Her muscles felt tense under his arms. He started to apologize, to let her go.
But she clung to him, a tiny bead of perspiration running down to her collar bone, nestling in the hollow. He wanted to bend down and taste that part of her. She’d be salty, he conjectured, but sweet, too. How could be thinking these things about his benefactor’s wife? Lord Dorner was a kind man, a decent man, who’d taken in a boy he didn’t know and trusted him to behave himself. He didn’t deserve this kind of reward. Benny pushed Harriet away.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I’m not thinking.’
‘No, Benny, listen to me.’ She was still clinging to his hand. ‘It’s all right.’ She was rearranging the strap on her dress now. ‘Let’s sit down. We’ll talk.’
He looked at the chair in front of his desk. But she sat on the bed. He knew he should sit on the chair, away from temptation, but he sat on the other side of the bed. Just to be sure, he placed a pillow between them. She eyed it with a smile. Probably thinking that a six-foot concrete wall down the middle of the bed wouldn’t have made any difference. He told himself not to think about the way her chest rose and fell beneath her silk bodice. Not to look at the hollows under her collar bone. They were just sitting and talking. Like friends. Like benefactress and beneficiary.
‘Benny, what were you thinking about when I came in?’ Her eyes were full of concern.
‘Nothing. Just musing about time passing, things changing.’
‘Our little group here at Fairfleet is all dissolving, isn’t it?’ She sounded sad. ‘I know the boys keep in touch, and some of them visit when they can, but it’s not the same. But you know this will always be your home, don’t you?’
Did he?
‘We’ll always want to know what you’re up to and we’ll always be here to help.’ Her hand stoked the pillowcase. He watched the manicured fingers slide over the ivory linen. ‘Can’t you tell me what’s on your mind?’
Which bit? Still her fingers maintained their rhythmic, slow, sliding movement. He put his hand on the pillowcase. Her hand stopped. Then it started moving again, brushing his fingers, progressing to the top of his hand. She turned it over so the palm was upright and carried on stroking, very slowly. Perhaps she thought it was soothing, like comforting a child who’d taken a fall. It wasn’t; it was like throwing a lighted match onto a bonfire.
All it needed was petrol. He reclaimed his hand and placed it between her breasts. He could feel her heart beating beneath the fabric. He couldn’t remember feeling someone else’s heart before. Harriet Dorner was flesh and blood, too, her heart pumped blood around her body. His fingers splayed out, not wanting to rush, wanting to take time. She moved closer to him and sighed.
‘I didn’t mean this to happen, Benny.’
But the hand that had been stroking his palm was now touching his face, the index finger running over his lips. He pulled away the pillow between them. She lay down. He looked at her on the eiderdown of his single bed, until now just an ordinary bed with a plain wooden headboard, a marker of his youthful, novice status, but now transformed into something extraordinary. Harriet Dorner was reclining on his bed, with the bodice of her silk evening dress pulled down from her breasts so that he could see lace underwear underneath. Half of him wanted just to sit there, feasting his eyes. But the other half was impatient.
He lowered himself down beside her. His lips remembered the first kiss and almost ached to do it again. She rolled over so that her body was pressed against his; he could feel every curve of her under the light silk, even the little stud-like pressure of the buttons on her thighs which must be some kind of underwear fastener. For her stockings, perhaps. He knew so little about what women wore, what they wanted. Fairfleet had been a male cauldron, most of the time.
Perhaps she guessed that he was clueless. She took his hand and guided it over her breasts. More of the lace undergarment was exposed. It didn’t seem to be covering as much of her as it was supposed to. He could see the darker colour of her –
‘Goodnight, Benny.’ Lord Dorner, standing outside the closed door, seeing the light on, probably thinking his protégé was doing some late-night reading.
Benny sat up. Harriet sat, too. A door opened along the landing.
‘I’ll go through to him.’ She rearranged underwear and dress. ‘He’ll think I’m in the bathroom.’ The Dorners’ bedroom didn’t have an en-suite bathroom, something that Ernst, whose father had once run a prestigious hotel, had commented on with surprise. ‘What were we thinking of? I’m sorry.’ She pushed a blond lock off her face. ‘But I know there’s something bothering you, Benny. Not just … what’s happened between us. Sometimes I wonder if … But it’s for you to tell me.’
What had he got to lose now? She must already think he was a sex-crazed lunatic. Identifying himself as a non-Jewish sex-crazed, German lunatic imposter was only one more step deeper into trouble. If she woke up in the morning and decided that Benny had to go, what did it matter?
‘Harriet?’ Lord Dorner again.
She got up and checked her reflection in the mirror above the chest of drawers, fiddling with her hair.
‘We need to be up early for the Cheltenham trip,’ her husband called.
‘Listen, Benny.’ She spoke quietly, urgently. ‘Forget about this. It’s not going to happen again.’
‘Never?’
She was silent.
‘You can’t say that, can you, Harriet? You can’t promise yourself that you don’t want it to happen again.’
She adjusted her pearls. ‘I’m married. And you are very young.’
‘I won’t always be so young. Just tell me when and I’ll come to you; wherever I am, I’ll come.’ When Lord Dorner was no longer around, he meant. The man was old, late forties, perhaps older.
She walked past him on the way to the door.
‘Just tell me,’ he repeated. ‘Send for me. I’ll come. Will you promise, Harriet?’
‘Yes.’ She said it very quietly, but he heard the word all the same.
*
Send for me,
he told her, decades, aeons, later, as he lay dying. Benny was dissolving into a collection of molecules belonging to all the parts he’d played, but for the moment it was the young man who’d loved Harriet who held the strongest outline. Harriet was standing over him, fiddling with something on his mouth, some kind of mask. She looked older than she had that August night, but still beautiful, even though her hair was brown now, not fair.
He’d last seen Harriet alone one last time, years after the encounter in his bedroom. She’d called him and he’d come, just as he’d promised. Must have been 1950.
*
Fairfleet had been neglected. Benny jumped over a rain-filled pothole the size of a bath in the drive and wondered if he’d been rash to risk his new flannel trousers. Not to mention the almost-new black overcoat from a market in Kingston.
Clearing out bookshelves, etc
, Harriet had telegrammed.
Please return and say what we should store.
He’d held the telegram and blinked. The first words from her since Lord Dorner had died in 1948 and she’d telegrammed. She’d been in America, but now she was back. Nothing stood between them anymore.
Dr Dawes had long since returned to Oxford. Benny himself was coming back to this house having completed basic training, three years at university and the first months of his
first job on the
Surrey Comet
, based in Kingston. Holidays had been spent with the tutor, or overseas, if Benny had money and companions. He hadn’t found himself back at Fairfleet. What was the point, if she wasn’t there? The place had been boarded up, in any case, left to Alice Smith to look after.
A November afternoon would challenge any building to look its best. Fairfleet seemed to glower at the end of its drive like a slouching, sulky, dirty-grey beast. Chunks of plaster had fallen off the walls. Weeds grew up through the gravel. The wings on the fountain statue had come off. He caught a glimpse of the topiary hedges: now shapeless lumps of box tree. The whole scene dared Benny to make comparisons with the way it had once been.
What must Harriet think of this battered old country after those years in America? Did she miss Lord Dorner very much? He’d taken care over the writing of his telegram in response to hers, tossing several drafts into the wastepaper bin.
Finally he’d written:
Convenient next Saturday?
She’d sent back a single
Yes Sat
. in reply. She wouldn’t be able to say much in a telegram, but they both knew what these telegrams meant.
How would it be when he saw her? He certainly wasn’t the naive boy he’d been when he left Fairfleet. The one who’d been so shocked and thrilled when they’d been together on his bed. He’d had his adventures during the years away from Fairfleet.
He couldn’t help excitement rippling through him. When he’d checked his reflection in the small mirror by the front door just before leaving, he’d glimpsed Vati in the glass; Vati as he’d been when Benny, Rudi back then, was tiny, before the Party had stuck its nose into Vati’s precious rolling-stock, railway lines and points systems. In those days Vati left for work in the morning, eyes twinkling, tall, broad-shouldered.
‘Have a good day, gorgeous,’ his mother had called after Vati. The words rang through Benny’s memory and, as always, he tried to blank them. This time he couldn’t.
But as he approached the house it became impossible to keep thoughts of Vati in his head, anyway. On the late-autumn dun-coloured grass lay a single peacock feather. Must be one of the last. Usually the peacocks had shedded completely by now. They’d died out slowly over the war. The boys had suspected that at least one of the birds had found its final destiny in a stew pot. He picked up the feather and its eye stared at him.
When he’d lived at Fairfleet he’d always walked straight in. It took a conscious effort for him to press the bell like a visitor. He’d never rung it before and wasn’t sure that it worked. No sound came from the house. He was about to push it again when the door opened. He hadn’t expected her to open the door herself and was taken by surprise. For a moment he couldn’t think of anything to say. At first he thought she was unchanged. Then he noticed small lines around her eyes, very faint. But all the same, the age gap between them had shrunk, he noted, with triumph.