‘That’s very kind of you,’ Ellie says. ‘I’m sure it would be much better than a campsite.’
‘And maybe you can have dinner with us. Would you like that? I have a simple house, but interesting.’
The car has left the valley and is winding up forested slopes, stuttering across a high, wooded plateau. The sun catches the tops of the hills, imposing a dangerous flush of pink on the black trees. After a while they turn off the road and up a gravel drive. The house – simple but interesting – lies against a wooded slope at the back of an expansive lawn. It is like something out of fairy tales, a Hansel and Gretel house built entirely of wood, clad in wood, even tiled in wood – ‘It is called Schindel,’ Horst informs them, adding that he believes the word also appears in English, as ‘shingle’. The roof slopes down almost to head height. There are dormer windows like startled eyes. Quaint benches guard either side of the front door, while pots of pelargoniums illuminate the window ledges. A doorbell hangs on a spiral spring.
Frau Eckstein almost apologises as they climb out of the car. ‘It is perhaps not as ancient as your Oxford colleges, but it is old, perhaps the oldest in this area. The sixteenth century. You may look if you wish.’
They dump their rucksacks on the edge of the lawn and follow the woman into her domain, feeling more and more like Hansel and Gretel in thrall to their captor. Inside there is the resinous scent of wood, the murmur of flexing floorboards, a sensation of quiet, considered age. They duck beneath beams and edge around posts. The stairs are like companionways, the floors like decking. The whole building creaks and shifts around them like a sailing ship under way through the tides of history. Occasional gaps between the floorboards give glimpses into the room below. ‘That does not make it a very private place,’ Frau Eckstein observes, laughing to signal the little pleasantry. ‘But the bathroom is at least of the twentieth century.’
And indeed, amongst all the woodwork, the bathroom gleams like a pathology lab. There is a white bath, and a bidet with its vague suggestion of sexual impropriety, and a shower cabinet that might be suitable for beaming you up to some orbiting star ship. But when they return to the ground floor it is to the pièce de résistance: the music room.
They stand at the door and peer in. The interior is redolent with beeswax. A grand piano stands at the centre like a coffin on a catafalque. Cellos, half a dozen cellos, some cased, some naked, gather round like solemn mourners. Photographs of the dead decorate the walls like saints in a chancel. One shows a balding, stout figure and is inscribed with a flourish de Birgit con cariño, Pablo. ‘Casals,’ Frau Eckstein remarks with a careless wave of one hand. Another frame encompasses the austere, aquiline face of Paul Tortelier. ‘We were very close,’ she explains, picking the picture up and gazing at it fondly. ‘At the conservatoire in Paris.’ She replaces it with loving care and indicates another, which shows a younger version of herself, rather stern, rather beautiful, sewn into a long, flared dress and standing beside a moustachioed man with piercing eyes. ‘Toscanini.’ And another – ‘Furtwängler’ – before she looks at Ellie and James with careful eyes, as though measuring them up for something, the cooking pot perhaps. ‘Do you enjoy the cello?’
‘I love the cello,’ Ellie says. ‘I saw Jacqueline du Pré playing the Elgar at the Royal Festival Hall. She was wonderful.’
The woman sighs, a fraction impatient. ‘Ah, Jackie, dear Jackie. Great talent but rather too much emotion, I fear. Emotion will always find you out in the end.’ She touches one of the instruments. ‘This is my Guadagnini. Perhaps I will play it for you after supper. Would you like that?’
Of course they would, even if, in James’s case, they really wouldn’t, because the whole stuff of classical music, the seriosity of it, the long gowns and stiff collars and tailcoats, bores him. Guadagnini? What the fuck does that mean?
‘But first you must make yourselves comfortable. You must pitch your tent, must you not? Before it gets dark. I am sorry I cannot offer you a room, but with Horst here, you see we have no place. It is not a big house. But it is a bit like being children again, no? Pitching your tent on the lawn, I mean.’
Ellie seems delighted at another little point of contact. ‘I used to do that with my brother!’
‘Of course you did. Everyone does.’ Which somehow makes it less remarkable. ‘And you must use the bathroom if you wish. This, I remember, is the bad thing of camping, that you often have no bathroom.’
So they pitch their tent in the dusk, keeping their voices low to avoid being overheard, giggling like children as they crawl around inside the tent and try to sort things out. What do they think of their hostess?
A sharp old witch.
Rather beautiful. A kindly witch.
Did you see her fingers? Lobster claws. All that cello-playing.
And what was that Gwadaninny business?
Guadagnini. The cello maker. Second only to Stradivarius. Don’t you know anything? It’s probably worth hundreds of thousands.
Not as much as Horst, I’ll bet. Von Eberhafen, no less.
Prussian?
Nazi?
What was she doing during the war, do you think?
Playing to the troops, I suppose.
And Horst? Strutting around eastern Poland shooting Jews in the neck?
He’d only have been about ten.
Hitler Youth, then. Longing to get into action and shoot Jews in the neck.
They take turns to use the bathroom. The kindly witch has put out towels for them. ‘Make yourselves at home,’ she says, seeing James climbing the stairs. ‘Dinner will be ready in half an hour. Is that all right? Just come in and find us in the dining room.’
The dining room is on the opposite side of the hall from the music room, a wood-panelled cigar box of a space with a tiled stove in one corner and wall lamps that mimic gas lights. They sit at a polished slab of wood while a small, silent woman – ‘This is Frau Weber’ – brings food in from the kitchen. Conversation is awkward and incidental – how lovely the house, how beautiful the dining room, how fine the setting.
‘We had only gas lighting until after the war,’ Frau Eckstein explains, ‘but when my husband came back we decided to move finally into the twentieth century.’
Her husband? Suddenly there is a human shape amongst the inanimate shadows in the corners of the room. Where is her husband? And where has he returned from, with his ideas of finally joining the twentieth century?
‘Your husband?’ James asks.
‘My husband is not alive now. He was sent to the Eastern Front and the Russians took him prisoner. He did not come back until 1952 and then he was no longer’ – she pauses and considers carefully what words to use – ‘the same. Physically. So he did not live many more years. But at least he died in freedom.’
Horst reaches across the table and takes his aunt’s hand. In his precise, perfectly enunciated English, he explains. ‘Onkel Julius was a courageous man. A doctor of medicine of great learning who did not like the National Socialist ideas of science. That was why he was sent to the Russian front.’
‘But it was also why he survived being a prisoner,’ his aunt adds. ‘Because it was a skill that the Russians valued. So he survived in the camps as a doctor and at last he came home.’
There is a silence while they contemplate this, the kind of silence you wish someone would break. James offers himself up as a sacrificial lamb: ‘My father was in the army. During the war. The Royal Army Service Corps. RASC.’