‘All right,’ I said. ‘Now I’d like to know what’s the matter with you? What went wrong at the Grundlsee?’
‘Nothing went wrong. Why should it?’
‘I don’t know why, but it did. I suppose you fell in love?’ Nini glared at me, attempting outrage. Then she put down her fork and groped for a handkerchief.
‘It was so unfair! I can’t tell you how ridiculous he looked — well, not ridiculous, but absolutely like someone you couldn’t possibly be in the slightest danger from. Hardly taller than me, with floppy hair all over his eyes, and socks that kept coming down — and a snub nose. He didn’t even have eyes that were a proper colour. Not blue or brown or black… just bits of colours with flecks in them.’
Was he working in the children’s camp?’
‘Yes, he was. I didn’t notice him at the beginning. There was a tall, good-looking Frenchman that I was rather interested in. Whereas Daniel came from America and that was against him — a hotbed of capitalism — and then they said he was a bank clerk. Both his parents were Austrian, but their families emigrated separately and they met in New York. So Daniel was a second-generation immigrant, but his German was perfect of course. Only as I say I didn’t notice him at first. It was the children that made me notice him.’
‘In what way?’
‘Well, there were a lot of counsellors — about eight of them, and some had diplomas in Psychology and all that, but the kids were always round Daniel. Only, he wasn’t really doing anything. I mean, not therapy or ploys… he was just looking at things. Almost being them… You know what I’m like about Nature — there wasn’t any Nature where I was born, just people packed together and the smell of drains and sweat. But Daniel has this passion for pebbles… I mean, pebbles. He’d sit crouched down on this path and just look at them and it’s perfectly true, they are all different and some of them have quartz in them and some have pale veins like jade and some — oh, God, listen to me! But the children would all crouch down too and suddenly it was incredible to be alive in a world of pebbles. He’d do it with trees, too. The other counsellors organized botany expeditions and brought little bits of branches in and the children learnt the names and drew them — but Daniel just lay under an oak tree and sort of became an oak.’
‘He sounds unusual. Very much so.’
‘Oh, he was unusual. Mad, really. His clothes… he looked as though he’d slept in them and his hair was across his face and he was quite small. I don’t like small men. Mind you, he wasn’t just a sort of fey Pied Piper, he was witty too. It was the children laughing you heard as often as you saw them staring at a stone. Once on a rainy day there was a meeting about the children’s behaviour problems and there was a great dossier about their backgrounds and a Counsellor’s Report. I wasn’t really part of it, I was just a washer up. Then I realized Daniel wasn’t there — he should have been but he wasn’t, and I slipped out. And I found him half way up the hill with all the children in his group and some of the others, and they’d collected twenty-seven salamanders — you know how they come out in the rain — and there they were, making a grotto for them out of moss and stones, and the kid who was cradling one of the salamanders very, very carefully in his hands was the one they were doing a Case History on down in the camp. Disturbed father, alcoholic mother, two convictions for petty thieving… I think for Daniel the children’s past didn’t really exist: he saw them as though they had just been born.’
She blew her nose and now that the Kaiserschmarr’n was beyond redemption, she speared up a forkful and put it in her mouth.
‘Anyway, I just joined in. There were fourteen children in his group and I became the fifteenth, I suppose, tagging along when I wasn’t doing the chores. He was nice to me but nothing more and I got fond of the kids. And honestly I felt quite safe because of the way his socks kept coming down and him having a snub nose and being so small.’ She paused and glared balefully at her plate. ‘I should have known there was something wrong about him. I should have known.’
Everything would have been all right, Nini went on, except that three days before she was due to come home there was an accident.
‘There was a counsellor there — a woman — who was terribly precise and fussy, always walking about with files and bits of paper trying to assess the children and write reports. Her children played her up like anything and whenever they could, they slipped off to join Daniel. Anyway on Sunday we all went rowing on the lake and one of the boys in her boat stood up and started fooling about and she got her oar caught and the kid fell in. It’s terribly deep, the Grundlsee, and we were half way across and the child couldn’t swim. The woman just shrieked and yelled and completely lost her nerve. I was in another boat with Daniel and he just dived in with all his clothes on and swam over to the boy. It was awful, Susanna; the most frightening thing I’ve seen. The other boats were a long way off and this idiotic woman just shrieked and shrieked. I rowed up as close as I could, but the boy in the water was in a complete panic and he clung on to Daniel’s neck and I thought he was going to choke him to death. They went down three times and they say that after three times…’
Nini’s voice broke. She retreated behind her handkerchief and I was silent, noting that for the first time she’d called me simply ‘Susanna’ without the ‘Frau’. However unhappy the outcome of this love affair, Nini was growing up and would soon leave me, and I registered the pang this caused me without the least surprise.
‘He had to half throttle the boy before he could tow him in and then when we were trying to get them into the boat, the boy came round and tried to pull Daniel under again. I thought we’d never do it… never.’
But the other boats had arrived by then; both of them were saved.
‘They took the boy to hospital, but Daniel wouldn’t go. They carried him to his room and he looked awful — he’d swallowed so much water and there were great bruises round his throat. Of course everyone was making the most awful fuss of him by then — he was a hero — so I kept away. But my room was opposite his and just before I went to bed I put my head round the door to see if he was all right. It was very late — and he said my name, and I went over to the bed.’
She broke off in a confusion I had never seen in her.
‘It’s so unfair,’ she said, returning yet again to this theme. ‘He was half drowned and there was something caught in his hair, some kind of water weed I suppose. And he didn’t ask or anything, he just stretched out his arm as though I was a glass of water and he needed a drink.’ Nini paused. Her black eyes were unfocused as she remembered. ‘I meant just to be kind — he’d done this brave thing. And after all, since I was fourteen I’ve had to… sometimes it was the only way we could eat. But oh God…’
Nini is almost never still. Now she sat unmoving as the bust of Nefertiti and as sad.
‘So then in the morning he said we must be married. He didn’t ask me, he just said it as though it was completely obvious, and the incredible thing was, I simply said yes. I mean, marriage — that awful bourgeois thing, so respectable and hampering, but I said yes without thinking at all. Only then we began to talk. I should have known but I didn’t. I should have seen there would be this awful betrayal, but I didn’t think he had it in him to be so deceitful and devious and cruel. It wasn’t as though he didn’t know how I felt about things: I’d told him often enough.’
‘But what was it? Was he married already? Had he committed a crime? What was the betrayal?’