The Very Thought of You (11 page)

It was only as she slowed down that she noticed an unexpected sound. a subtle shaking, arustling whisper, but musical too, like wind chimes. She jumped off the swing and followed the sound, skirting the woods to the grass terrace beyond – until she arrived at the source of the rustling. a cluster of slender trees with light bark. And small tremulous leaves – some still silvery-green, others turning autumnyellow.

They must be the aspen trees, thought Anna. Quivering trees which could play their own music. She tucked a few aspen leaves into her tunic pocket and ran back to her lessons.

Only yesterday, Miss Weir had taken them outside to collect autumn leaves for their nature diaries. Oaks, elms, sycamores, silver birches. Mr Ashton had greeted them in the Marble Hall as they returned to their classroom.

“Did you find anything interesting?”

Annapaused to show him her pressed leaves.

“Ah, but have you found the aspens yet?” he asked her lightly.

“No, sir, what are they?”

“The most unusual trees in the park, slender and silvergreen. When the wind blows through their leaves, they make their own special music. They sing.”

“Where can I find them?”

“Listen for them. Wait for a windy day, and you’ll hear them.”

“Come along, Anna…” Miss Weir called after her, and Annajoined her class, wondering if he was making it up.

But now she had the leaves to show him. She waited until the end of her Latin lesson, a quiet moment when everyone was scattering for tea.

“Here they are, sir. Aspen leaves.”

He was delighted with her find; she could see that, so she gave him some leaves.

“How did you find them so quickly, Anna?”

“I listened, just like you said.”

“that aspen grove was a favourite place of mine, when I was your age. But not many people ever notice it, so you should keep it to yourself,” he said with a smile, wheeling himself off.

Anna went back to her desk, and proudly stowed away the one leaf she had kept. If she ever wanted to get away from the other children, she had her own place to go now.

14

That evening, sitting with Elizabeth in the drawing room, Thomas felt something in his pocket. The aspen leaves; he put them on aside table.

“Collecting leaves?” asked his wife.

“Just a gift from one of the children.”

“you are popular these days,” came Elizabeth’s tart reply, as she rose to fetch an ashtray. Instantly, she regretted her tone; sometimes, she disliked her husband just for the acid he drew from her.

Thomas let the barb pass, and returned his eyes to his book, a Henry James novel. But it required concentration, and Thomas’s mind was wandering, following his wife as she walked about the room.

The ongoing erosion of their marriage was subtly cumulative, he felt, but turned on a series of failed moments which might perhaps have been different. For which he was to blame as much as her. There had been so many times when he might have reached out to Elizabeth and stroked her cheek, or caught her eye and touched her heart. But too often he would neither look at her, nor hear her silent calls; instead, he resisted her romantic gestures because he felt too foolish, in his condition, to be a lover.

Thomas knew that he had too often shut his own door on her.

Just as he was doing now, sitting in the drawing room while Elizabeth talked to her mother on the telephone. He watched her and saw that she was lovely. His wife. She put down the telephone.

“Elizabeth?”

She looked over to him, open for a moment. Too long he paused.

“Is your mother well?”

“Yes, quite well.”

“I’m glad.”

He hesitated. She waited for more words, but none came. He wheeled himself away to the bookcase, feigning interest in a set of French classics.

Why could he not tell her she was beautiful? Had his disability crippled his tongue too?

He leafed through a book which meant nothing to him. She walked past him, and out of the room. Ashton was a house where you could avoid each other’s silences by simply going to another room, another floor.

She went to sit on her own in their bedroom, with a drink.

Thomas picked up his novel again. Most of the time now, he had his own strategies for contentment: music, reading, listening to the wireless. But sometimes he allowed himself to recognize the acute compromises of his marriage. Two damaged people together, barely speaking.

He had hoped that this school initiative might rekindle their warmth, but perhaps it was just another false dawn. Any spontaneous intimacy seemed to elude them both at the moment. There was always that distance in her eyes. In his eyes, too.

He knew his disability had short-changed her, but he sensed other patterns at play too. As long as he could remember, he had always been straining to know how to love. He couldn’t say whether it was his stiff upbringing or his siblings’ deaths which had cauterized his feelings, but he knew there remained something remote about his heart.

He could recall Norton reassuring him that he was a natural diplomat when he first joined the Foreign Office, “because you can see all sides, while taking none,” he had said, as if fence-sitting was a virtue. Yet Thomas was wary of his own detachment.

He thought back to his younger self, arriving at Oxford and meeting girls for the first time. He could remember music drifting through the college quads on Saturday nights, and summer parties in damp sunlit gardens. He had worn
the new clothes, baggy trousers, patterned jerseys. Modern girls had arrived, smoking cigarettes and asking to dance. But his heart had remained untouched by anyone at that time: all the girls had seemed like strangers to him.

He had avoided intimacy, retreating instead into the excusable solitude of the Bodleian Library, and seeking out neglected books from the stacks. As a Classics student, the ancient poets had offered him unexpected consolations; their stoic forbearance eased something in him, as if all his recent family losses were but a passing shadow beside their epic grief.

I am seges est ubi Troia fuit.

“Now there are fields of corn where Troy once stood.” Ovid could conjure the vanished traces of a human glory greater than anything the present could show. As he edged towards aline’s meaning, he had often felt himself almost touching the allusive grace of lost times.

By now, Thomas had abandoned his evening’s reading, and poured himself a whisky instead. Rapidly, the drink relaxed him. Reminding him that he hadn’t always just been solitary and bookish, that there were other versions of his past too. He thought back to his years as a junior diplomat in Weimar Berlin, where the embassy had been so formal and yet the city so free. Where he had seen all his polite assumptions so swiftly dismantled.

It had been a lucky posting for him. Inside the goldfish bowls of Oxford and London, he had always been so guarded – but amongst foreigners, in the overcranked atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, he had at last felt liberated to experiment.

He had visited every kind of theatre. At the Wintergarten and the Metropol he watched extravagant displays of barelegged dancing girls – but then a raffish young German
diplomat, Max, took him downtown to the bawdier cabaret clubs, the Weisse Maus and its rival, the Schwarzer Kater.

Tentatively, Thomas allowed his eyes to meet the predatory glances of women in unsuitable bars, and began to find himself stirred by meetings with strangers. He even took Max’s lead and followed a prostitute with a swaying walk into a tenement block. Away from the mysterious shadows of the streetlamps she looked suddenly old, and the skin about her neck was loose. But Thomas’s gallantry would not let him back away from the poor woman’s unwilling pretence that she had any allure at all. So he had his first sexual encounter on an ageing woman’s narrow bed in a room which smelt of cabbage and herring. They did not kiss, nor even look at each other, and it was all a mistake, an act of strange repulsion. Nevertheless, the startling intimacy of seeing a woman’s unguarded nakedness did awaken something in Thomas.

Half-repelled, half-seduced by new sensations, he began to savour the cabaret scene. The women he met in bars reeked of cigarettes, and their clothes looked faintly soiled, yet he was oddly aroused by their smudged make-up and frank eroticism.

But he still kept his distance from these women. Until one evening he found himself seated beside the fifty-year-old wife of the Austrian ambassador at dinner, after a Beethoven concert. Their first conversation was deceptively stiff, banal even.

“My name is Margarete,” she told him with a tilt of her face – an engaging, intelligent face, he noticed.

“Do you follow music?” he asked politely.

“But of course. I grew up in Salzburg, beside Mozart’s house.”

“I’m afraid we lack your great composers.”

“Ah, but London has many other things to offer. You must miss it?”

“I am too busy exploring Berlin now—”

“No doubt there are a few sad hearts in London missing an attractive young man like you.”

Margarete spoke with such rueful warmth that Thomas felt suddenly self-conscious, and attended to the guest on his other side. But within minutes he turned to her once again, wanting to talk further.

Margarete was confident and worldly, with an erect carriage and a sensuous grace. In accented English she asked Thomas about his life in London, and was bemused by his formal prattle. She fattered him with her expansive appreciation of men. He resisted the eye contact with which she wooed him until the final course, but by that time he was enfolded by her warmth, and the glint of desire in her eye.

He began relaxing into the realization that she had set her mind on seducing him. She had shown him in her eyes that a connection was possible, and for the first time in his life he began to think about holding a woman. He wanted to see her again. He wanted to touch her – her fullness, her over-ripeness.

They met intermittently, at cocktails in the Adlon, at embassy receptions. The Austrian ambassador thought the polite young Englishman was a splendid fellow. On every occasion Margarete found a way to take the flirtation forwards – with her eyes, with a little pressure from her manyringed hand, or the sway of her walk as she came towards him or moved away.

One evening, in the gardens of the Belgian Embassy, they spoke alone for the first time.

“I have been thinking about you, Thomas,” she said. Her face was relaxed, amused.

“I think about you all the time,” he told her, his eyes agonized with longing. She looked at him fondly and told him where to come and when.

He arrived with a bunch of flowers at the given address. a sullen landlady showed him up to a room with a grand piano, where Margarete was waiting for him. She gave him champagne and led him to the adjoining bedroom. The heavy curtains were drawn, although it was early in the afternoon. The light was dun, with a streak of sunshine where the curtains left a gap.

She looked into his face and took him in her arms. They parted from their embrace only to kiss, and then Thomas felt her desire in the slippery urgency of her tongue. He undid her dress, then her corset, and watched her full body tumble forth. She bore all the marks of middle age – heavy breasts, stretch marks – but every imperfection only inflamed him further. She drew him to the bed and enfolded him with caressing arms. He saw the look of tenderness in her face, and heard her low, consoling voice. Years of boarding school absences from his mother vanished as he slipped into her. When the time came, her cry of release was the most intimate sound he had ever known.

Afterwards he buried his face on her breast. She stroked him and muttered tender words in German. He enjoyed her gentle hands, but even as they lay together, a part of him remained still detached: this was not love, he knew, this was a release of transgressive passion.

Nevertheless, he did feel tenderness for Margarete – a new feeling, which he cherished.

Their affair continued for six months. He loved to see her perfectly composed face at parties, so elegantly made up above the strictly corseted attire, when he knew her stripped bare, with legs apart and breasts tumbling. It was an eroticism which he worried might be unhealthy – a peculiar yearning for coarseness in women.

But his anxieties were summarily cut short when her husband was posted to Rome. There were mixed feelings in their parting, because their first lust was almost satiated, and unstated reservations were creeping in on both sides. But she insisted on an extravagantly loving final evening together, which eased them both.

Thomas tried to picture Margarete once more, and their intimate afternoons together. Her unstinting delight in his young body made him shiver a little, as he realized how sad she would be to see him now, so emasculated in his chair. He hoped she had never heard what had befallen him, wanting somebody, somewhere, to retain a clear memory of him as he had been. He was grateful now for the thought of her uncritical love.

She had sent him a telegram of congratulation on his engagement, he recalled. He had wondered whether to invite her to his wedding, but decided not to, for Elizabeth’s sake; he did not want to be distracted.

a sudden image came back to him from his wedding day, of Elizabeth in her ivory-silk dress walking down the aisle, her face lit up. He remembered how his eyes had welled as he watched her coming towards him; she looked so happy. After all his years of emotional distance, he had felt an unfamiliar surge inside as he made his vows.
So this is love
, he had thought.
at last
.

And yet their wedding had been followed by a spell of ill fortune. a few weeks later, as they drove around the Italian lakes on their honeymoon, a telegram reached them with news of his father’s fatal heart attack.

Thomas had barely buried his father and returned to Berlin with his bride when the Republic’s most brilliant statesman, Gustav Stresemann, collapsed with a stroke, dying soon after.

“Germany has lost the one leader who was holding the country back from its own precipice,” the ambassador announced to his staff gloomily. Three weeks later came the Wall Street Crash, plunging the world into depression.