It was a long letter and it ended: ‘I would like it very much if you remembered me.’
Well, I remembered her. I remembered her through the Anschluss and the war in which, by then, I was old enough to fight. I remembered her through three years of imprisonment by the Russians and I remembered her when, sick and verminous and sullen, I was released.
But by then the continent was adrift in chaos and I lost her. Physically. Literally. No letters reached her in England, none came to me.
All the same, within a year of the war’s end, I managed to get myself to London on a language course. I went, of course, to look for Ruth. Anyone less naive would have known how hopeless it was. Each evening, when I finished at the language school, I rang up another couple of dozen Goldmanns, trudged round the refugee organisations, the Emigration Office… Nothing…
And yet in the end, quite by chance, I did find someone.
I was walking, on a warm evening in May, from Swiss Cottage tube station towards the room in which I lodged. My way led through streets of large Victorian terrace houses, many of them knocked together to make a hostel or hotel.
In front of one of these I used to linger and eavesdrop. It was a kind of old people’s home — though a pretty classy one — run by a Viennese woman and filled with the elderly relatives of refugees whose matriarchal ‘Momma’ or embarrassingly proletarian ‘Poppa’ had not fitted into the new prosperity of the house in Golders Green or Finchley. From this hotel the smell of good Austrian cooking used to drift out, plus plaintive comments in German or Polish or broken English.
‘No,’ I heard on this particular day. ‘I go absolutely not to the death-bed of that old schickse. I am sensitive, me, and my nerves cannot hold out such nonsense.’
A pleading murmur, softer, in English. A resigned: ‘Once more, then; once more only, I go,’ from an old gentleman.
And an arm in a white overall, scooping up a huge, reluctant cat…
‘Excuse me, but do you have anyone staying here by the name of Ziegelmayer? Wilhelmina Ziegelmayer?’
The flustered maid looked at me with relief. ‘Oh yes, we were expecting one of the relatives. I’ll take you up.’
I followed her upstairs, opened the door.
On the pillows, in a nightdress of the austerest post-war cotton, lay Tante Wilhelmina. Where Herr Kugelheim had stood with his curling-tongs sat the matron, looking resigned and holding in a vice-like grip a large and displeased cat. And in a circle round the bed, creaking with visible reluctance, sat an assortment of elderly ladies and gentlemen.
Tante Wilhelmina was forgiving them. She forgave Frau Feldmann for taking the last of the sauerkraut at luncheon; she forgave Madame Kollinsky for always hogging the best armchair in the lounge. She forgave Herr Doktor Zellman for the extraordinarily unappetising way he left the bathroom.
And then Tante Wilhelmina saw me.
Really, I mean, saw me. She broke off, struggled up on her pillows, stretched out a hand. A spasm shook her and then over her silly, self-indulgent face there came a look that I had never seen on it before: a look of pure and unmistakable happiness.
‘Ferdi,’ she said, loud and clear, ‘Ferdi! I forgive you, Ferdi; I forgive you everything?
Then she fell back on the pillows. Her breathing changed. Behind me I heard light footsteps, a door opening; someone begin softly to weep. It was only then that I realised that Tante Wilhelmina had made it at last, that she was dead. And I turned round and there was Ruth…
‘I’m so glad,’ said Ruth later. ‘Oh, God, I’m so glad she had the chance to forgive him.’
I don’t know where we were then. Hampstead Heath, perhaps. We had walked about for hours, holding each other’s hands like greedy children, and now it was quiet and green.
‘I’m glad, too. But I don’t understand, really. Why did she think I was Uncle Ferdi suddenly? She seemed quite sane.’
Ruth turned to me, surprised. ‘I forgot you didn’t know,’ she said. Then she opened her handbag, took out a mirror and held it up to me.
I looked at myself. Blue eyes; fair hair; shrapnel scar on the temple. Just a face.
Try a moustache,’ said Ruth. ‘And gold pince-nez.’
‘No,’ I said. Wo.’
Ruth nodded. ‘He was very lonely. And your mother was a sweet woman. You’re very like him.’
‘Good God! So that was the sin Tante Wilhelmina couldn’t forgive him! An affair with the housekeeper. To be made a fool of in her own house!’
Ruth smiled, but her gold-flecked eyes were sad. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That was a big thing and it was years after. Tante Wilhelmina was awfully good about it. You know what a pet she made of you.’
‘But what, then? What had he done?’
So then Ruth lay back in the grass and I took her in my arms and she told me.
And if our marriage is exceptionally happy, if really we don’t seem to quarrel over trifles, perhaps it is because we both remember an old woman — locked in loneliness and silence because thirty years earlier, her new young husband, in a careless moment, had told her that her fresh-baked apfelstrudel tasted like a boot…
Tangle of Seaweed
She was always reading, Nell. Well, when she wasn’t stroking the sooty London leaves of plane trees or laying her cheeks against cool window-panes or loving — ecstatically — unsuitable young men. You could have given her a Chinese couplet from any part of the Golden Dynasty of T’ang and she’d have finished it for you. Dostoyevsky was her brother, Victorian children’s books her passion and though she lived, when in funds, mainly on avocado pears, she took her bath each night with a different cookery book.
But somehow Freud, that great psychologist had passed her by. His theory, for example, that we forget what we want to forget, lose what we want to lose, had hardly crossed her mind.
So when she woke up and couldn’t at once find her engagement ring beside the bed, her panic, though intense, had no particular overtones. Sleep-drugged, she blundered round the room, picking things up, feeling the sweat collect on the nape of her neck. Larissa and Kay, with whom she shared the flat, wandered in and, their eyes half-shut still, began groping for it too. Looking for the ring Harold had given Nell had become second nature to them by now.
Nell found it herself, on the bathroom shelf next to the indigestion tablets which she’d bought because everyone knew that being engaged made you tense and gave you stomach cramps, and even before she’d cleaned her teeth she put it on and it was like putting on Harold. She felt safe, controlled, calm.
Harold… She was so grateful to Harold for so much. For being called Harold in the first place, when no one really was any more. For having a mother whom he not only loved but was taking that very afternoon to the Zoo. The idea of Harold steering his mother from the baboons to the sea lions, from the coypu pond to the zebra house, pulling her gently out of the way of supercilious camels with sticky children on their backs was, to Nell, infinitely touching. A guarantee, too, of the changes that would take place in her own life when she was married to Harold. She would stop drifting, taking any old job like this one she was doing now, for example. She would learn to say, ‘No’. ‘No, I will not lend you my last fiver.’ ‘No,’ (to the men who were never called Harold) ‘you cannot take me to Hampstead Heath to hear the nightingales, to St Tropez in your string vest of a car…’