THEY followed Lilli through the darkened living-room, where Matthias was standing, immensely excited, ringing a little silver bell, and all of them moved slowly into the unlit hallway at the foot of the stairs, to wait outside the dining-room. The candles swayed in the cool currents of air, and, as they stood there, they could see the shape of the dining-room door outlined in a rippling light that shone through the gaps betouen the door and the frame from inside.
“This is the special room that no one has been allowed into,” Lilli said. “Why did the bell ring?”
“Father Christmas has just gone!” Matthias shouted, very shrill, the bell ringing erratically as he jumped up and down.
“And what has he left for us in this room?”
The words were like a catechism.
“Christmas presents, and the tree, the tree!”
Matthias was in an ecstasy of expectancy.
“Open the door, Matty.”
Lilli gave a small conspiratorial smile to Corrie and Jo as Matthias put his hand on the doorknob, hesitated rather nervously, looked round to see that they were still with him, and then pushed it hard so that it swung completely open.
There was a squeal from Matthias.
The whole room was green and silver, lit only by the glow of scores of candles. The tree was the sole decoration, dominating the room, up to the height of the ceiling in the corner near the window, glittering with strands of silver hanging down from every branch, and for a moment—with the current of air gusting in as the door opened, and the heat and glow as they entered, the birthday-cake smell of burning candles—the whole tree, and the room, seemed to sway away and then back towards them as the shadows shifted. Candles covered the tree and rimmed the dining-table; and Lilli’s glazed paintings, lining the walls, reflected back and multiplied the images of hundreds of candle flames, hovering in the air about them like bright fluttering wings. From the glass of every painting, from the polished wooden frames, from every reflective surface in the room—the face of the clock, the glasses and cutlery on the table, the metallic paper around the presents on the low tables in the bay of the window—light danced and pulsated, as if they were in a small and brilliantly lit church. Outside, in the cold and wet of the winter evening, the coloured bulbs on the bare branches of the horse-chestnut tree in the middle of Dunwich Green looked wan and distant, pale beyond the reflected glow in the dark glass of the window.
They were like some miniature religious procession as they moved into the room, advancing towards the altar for some service of memorial. As formally as she had made her little speech in the sun lounge, Lilli kissed each of them in turn as they stood around the table in the candlelight.
“This year we sit at the table and think of the members of our family who are not with us,” she said quietly. Corrie glanced at Jo. They stood in silence for a moment with their heads bowed, and then sat down.
Meissen china plates—Corrie had seen them only once before—lined the centre of the table, filled with fruit, nuts and raisins, sweets, ribbons, tiny richly decorated spiced biscuits in ornate moulded shapes, hearts and diamonds, candied lemon and orange, iced stars with cherries, all beautifully arranged, and, as the centrepiece of the whole table, there was an elaborate and minutely detailed “Hansel and Gretel” gingerbread house, shaped just like the night-light Jo had in his bedroom. Steep-roofed, tiled with little twisted biscuits covered in Hundreds and Thousands, icing like snow dripping down from the overhanging eaves, its door partly open, it stood beneath the candles like the cottage beneath the trees in the heart of the forest, waiting for the approach of the abandoned children.
“‘Beside a dark pathless forest there lived a poor wood-cutter with his second wife and his two children, a little boy and a little girl,’” Corrie said, looking at the gingerbread house.
“‘The boy was called Hansel, and the girl …’” Lilli paused, looking at Matthias.
“Gretel!” Matthias shouted. He looked across at Corrie. “I do feel hungry now. It’s lovely, Lilli. It’s lovely. I’m going to eat everything!”
He took his eating very seriously. You could take Baskerville’s bowl away from him when he was eating, and he would only look very sad and miserable but make no objection. Matthias bashed people with his spoon.
Jo started to speak, Lilli smiled, and then everyone was talking, and the muted solemnity of the beginning—an Easter mood, a Good Friday mood—became animated and lively, and Lilli, after talking with them, went out of the room towards the kitchen, to bring in the first course of the Christmas meal.
AS THE meal continued, the unfamiliar weight of the silver cutlery in his hands, Corrie became convinced that Lilli, with her German Christmas, was not re-creating something she had herself once experienced, an expatriate, after many years, feeding the nostalgia for a ceremony in which she had once taken part. The speech in the sun lounge had not been her words: she had been quoting something she had read, and all he saw around him, carefully and beautifully contrived, was as novel to her as it was to them, possibly inaccurate, a creation from books and research, not from memory. Christmas was a feast she would never have kept when she was in Germany, because Christmas was not a Jewish festival.
He had a secret, sort of, about himself.
Like Nickolaus Mittler and his big brother, like Leon Werth and his family, he was Jewish, and he had not known it until two years ago. As Lilli was Jewish, then, by the rulings of Germany in the 1930s, he himself—Gentile and uncircumcised—was also Jewish, a Mischling, Second Degree, a child with one Jewish grandparent, descent through the female line being Jewish Law. It was something inside himself, something in his blood.
It had been Christmas two years ago when he had found out about Lilli Danielsohn. The name had been a strange one to him, an unfamiliar disguise in someone he had known all his life. To him, his grandmother had always been Lilli, and, sometimes, when he wrote to her to thank her for presents at Christmas or on his birthday, she was Mrs. Meeuwissen—his father’s mother—when he addressed the envelope, someone with the same surname as himself. Her German accent was just the way she spoke.
Lilli, like the girl bound to silence in “The Six Swans,” had never spoken a word about her past, her life in Germany, her family; her books and paintings had remained locked away, from herself, and from everyone else. Four years ago, Grandpa Michael had died, and Lilli had left the house where the two of them had lived in Dorset, and moved to London. In London, living alone, her husband dead, she had begun to look at the paintings again for the first time in forty years.
When she had been there for two years, they had gone from Southwold to see her. She had changed—become very quiet and introspective, not the seemingly stern and commanding woman he had always known—and the little London house had seemed bare, a place without memories, as if she had no past she could place around her; but on the evening of the first Sunday of their stay, when they were talking around the fire, he had found out about Lilli Danielsohn. The things she had not spoken about for all those years were said—a decision she had come to before they arrived. It was something she had wanted to talk about.
She had spoken of places and events from history books, enclosed within dates—(1933-1945)—like the life of someone famous who had died, or the duration of a war that had ended long ago. But these historical events, these dates, had been a part of her life. She had lived through them. She had been there. When she married Grandpa Meeuwissen in 1939, she had been a refugee from Germany: his parents had known this much, though he and Jo had not. When she had left the country in 1938, to arrive alone and unknown in England, she had been famous throughout Germany as an artist. Her first book, Kinderstimmen, a series of illustrations for German poems about childhood, had been published in Berlin by Ullstein in 1924, in the same week as When We Were Very Young was first published in London. Her work had met with increasing success in the late 1920s and early 1930s, until, in 1933, the Nazis had come to power. Copies of her books had been burned by the Nazis in Berlin in 1933, in Unter den Linden, between the Opera House and the University. The children’s stories had gone up in flames, like Erich Kästner’s books, with the works of Freud, Marx, Mann, Heine, and all the others, because she and her family were Jewish. She had been unable to publish any more of her work.
That evening, hesitant and shy, she had taken her paintings out of the drawer in the roll-top desk where she had kept them locked up all those years, unglazed, loose in cardboard folders, and shown them. His parents had never known that she had been an artist. Since she left Germany, she had not painted again.
He would never forget that evening, and his first sight of the paintings he now knew so well, all around him on the walls of the dining-room. She had given each of them one of her original water-colours for a Grimm’s fairy-story as a Christmas present. His was the illustration for “Hansel and Gretel,” the painting beside his bed that he studied each evening. It was the first of her paintings that he had seen, and he thought it very beautiful. It was the loveliest present he had ever been given.
She had embraced them all when they left to return to Southwold.
They visited her again in the summer, and she had seemed a lot older.
He saw her one evening, thinking she was unobserved, walking about the small garden like the personification of Sorrow in a morality play, bent over, walking up and down as the light began to fail. He was afraid to approach, shrinking away from her deep and private source of grief, her numbed face that looked as if it had been exposed to intense and prolonged cold. Seeing her like this, he thought of someone carrying and shielding a flickering candle in a wind-swept corridor. Thoughts in her head, like candles on a child’s birthday cake, dipped and bent, but never flickered out into darkness. The small intense flames were always there. Her eyes had the blind unfocused stare of someone who had gazed too intently into the candle flame, and who carried a dark shadow impressed deep inside the eye.
Several months later, she had suffered her stroke, and after some time in hospital, Dad had brought her from London to live next door to them, with the connecting door between the two houses, and the months of recovery and teaching had started, and he had come to know someone new, a Lilli who was not the woman in the bare house or the dark garden.
IN NOVELS, particularly in Victorian novels, the author invented a complete family history for his characters, and, as the reader, one could know more about the histories of these fictitious families than one knew about one’s own family history: this, Corrie supposed, was part of the pleasure of fiction. It had struck him as slightly wrong that the characters always seemed to possess an awareness of every detail of their family history—unless a startling discovery were a major part of the plot—feeling themselves firmly placed in a structured and predictable family tree. His life had been lived with blanks and absences, emptinesses that he had been too uninformed or too reticent to explore.
Discovering his Jewishness—it couldn’t be denied, could it?—he felt as though he had opened some forbidden door, made some shocking discovery which overturned all the certainties in his life. He felt as though he had suddenly discovered that he’d been adopted, and that all his assumptions about his parentage, all his beliefs about who he was, were completely false. He had no concrete dogma to hold on to, no self-protecting litany to chant like the song of the bird in “The Juniper Tree.” It had sounded so odd when Lilli had spoken about “marrying an Englishman”—Grandpa Michael—and “becoming a Christian.” He knew hardly anything about the Jewish religion, had never even spoken with anyone about it. Once, in the summer holidays, he had gone with Cato Levi, his friend at school, to a demonstration outside the Soviet Embassy against the treatment of a Jewish dissident, but he had felt quite separate from all those angry young people, who seemed sure of who they were and what they wanted. He had been a little bit frightened.
In Lilli’s house in London, amongst her many books, there was a copy of The Children’s Haggadah, a book published in 1937, which he had looked at, curious and confused, in the days after that Sunday evening, to try and learn something about the Jewish religion, feeling as though he were reading about an invented religion in a mythical land called Rousseau, a Middle Earth, a Narnia, an Earthsea. The book read from back to front, and on the back cover was a picture of a small child in a skull-cap lying asleep in bed, clutching the book in his arms. Inside, little pieces of card could be pulled from side to side to make the pictures move: the baby Moses floated down the Nile in his basket, the Egyptian army sank beneath the sea. On the evening before the eve of Passover, the father of the family goes into every room of his house to see whether all leavened food has been cleared away. It is customary to place small pieces of bread in every room, and the father collects them carefully by the light of a candle. These are burned on the following morning soon after breakfast.
If he had discovered that he were a Roman Catholic, and had not known it, he would have felt the same suffocating approach of things of which he knew little: candles, rosaries, rich vestments, and confessions of one’s most secret thoughts to an unknown man. But he had at least been in a Catholic church. He had never been inside a synagogue. He had seen one once, from a car, and it had seemed an intensely enclosed and private place, a windowless façade, inward-looking, a place to which no strangers could ever be admitted.
THE LIGHTS began to dim, like a coal fire settling. Candles began to gutter and go out, one by one, as the meal came to an end. When the candles were all out, they would start to unwrap their presents, opening gifts in the evening, with the birth, not waiting until the following morning, after the child had been born. He looked around at the shifting luminescence of the many candles. Wasn’t there a Jewish festival called the Feast of Lights? Was it a feast of rejoicing, or a mourning for the dead? All the candles, flickering across the glass of the water-colours, the figures indistinct in the blurred air, were like the memorial candles one lit in churches on the continent.
If there was any self-portrait in Lilli’s illustrations showing her as he had seen her that Christmas two years ago, it was the illustration of the mother in “The Wilful Child,” the shortest story she had ever illustrated, only a third of a page long. It was the final illustration in the last book she had published in Germany, at the very beginning of 1933.
The mother, a young woman in her early thirties, bent over the grave of her child, looking with great intentness at the child’s arm, which stretched upwards out of the soil, refusing to be buried. In her hand the mother was holding a branch, with which she was attempting to strike at the arm, so that the child would withdraw its arm beneath the ground, and lie at peace. The expression on this mother’s face he had seen on Lilli’s. The curious ambiguous mixture of anguish and determination was the expression of a woman trying to will herself to creep up and smother a much-loved child who was dying painfully of a lingering illness.
THE MAIN frontage of Southwold School filled the south side of Dunwich Green, the southernmost of all the Greens in Southwold, and in Lilli’s dining-room the sound of the school clock from the tower was clear and distinct as it struck seven o’clock. A short while later, the mechanical bells of the clock above the restaurant on the side of the Green opposite the school struck the hour, followed by the chiming of the music for the folk-song “Long A-Growing.”
They moved away from the table to group around the fire. They sat in the dimming light, a cave of chiaroscuro, like Lilli’s illustration for “Snow White,” the little girl kneeling on the chair in the country cottage, reaching up towards the open window where a hand appeared, holding out half an apple to her. On the table nearest to Corrie was an oddly shaped parcel, labelled “To Baskerville, with love from Jo.” He signed his name “Jo,” with a small “j,” and a smiling face—two dots and a curve—inside a very large “O.” There was a separate table for each person’s presents.
Until the candles burned fully down, before the presents could be opened, they were to read, play music, and recite poems they had newly learned by heart. Lilli had asked if they would do this, a week before Christmas, after Dad had left to drive to Heathrow airport, the same day the terrorists had entered the Berlin school. Corrie and Jo were both used to performing, particularly music. Corrie had started an Elizabethan consort in school, the Elizabethan World Picture, and Dad, Mum, he, and Jo had regularly played together, for friends and relations, or by themselves, a family in a quiet room, absorbed in a piece of music together. Their instruments were ready, set out for them by Lilli. They had practised their pieces in the music rooms.
Lilli began by reading the story of the nativity from St. Luke’s gospel, words of scripture—“swaddling clothes,” “a multitude of the heavenly host”—that had been a part of the mind since early childhood, like some hymns, and certain poems and stories, as if they had always been there, a rhythm of sound that awakened memories of the time before the words had been understood.
When Lilli had finished reading, Jo stood up and began to sing, in his clear, pure voice, “In the bleak mid-winter,” the carol he was going to sing in the service on the Green. Lilli was not going to come out into the rain and cold, though Sal was coming round later that night, and Matthias would not have been alone in the house. Sal and Lilli would watch from the dining-room window.
Everyone applauded when he had finished, and he bowed to each of them in turn.
“Thank you,” he said. “Unexpected and gratifying, if a little lacking in Smack.”
It was Corrie’s turn now.
He brought over one of the dining-chairs, and sat down with his cello, spending a long time shifting his position until he was completely satisfied. Jo, standing beside him, looked at him for his signal.
Corrie took a deep breath. They were going to perform one of the songs he had written for “Hansel and Gretel.” He had found the words in Kinderstimmen, the final poem in the book: “Auf meines Kindes Tod.” It was by Joseph von Eichendorff, a nineteenth-century German writer. He had got Jo to learn it in the original German.
“This is especially for Lilli,” he said. “You won’t recognise the music, but I think you’ll recognise the words.”
He felt very nervous of playing this in front of other people, even though they were people who had often listened to music he had written, but Lilli had given him a part of herself in giving him her painting: he would now give her a part of himself in return, a piece of music he had written himself.
He nodded at Jo and, bent over the cello, began to play the long piece of wordless music before the song began. At the exact moment he moved into a higher key, Jo began to sing:
“Von fern die Uhren schlagen,
Es ist schon tiefe Nacht,
Die Lampe brennt so düster,
Dein Bettlein ist gemacht.
Die Winde nur noch gehen
Wehklagend um das Haus.
Wir sitzen einsam drinnen
Und lauschen oft hinaus.
Es ist, als müsstest leise
Du klopfen an die Tür …”
The illustration of the empty cradle was on the wall opposite them.
When he had finished playing, Corrie held his position for a moment, and then relaxed, leaning back and looking across at Lilli. She was gazing across at the painting, holding tightly on to Matthias as he sat on her knee, lying against her. She said nothing for some time, and then looked at him.
“You wrote that music, Corrie, didn’t you?”
He nodded.
“I have never heard that poem as a song before, but your music made it into a beautiful one. Thank you.”
After they had listened to some poetry, and Matthias had sung a song he had heard on the radio, the same line over and over again, Jo played a gavotte on his flute, composed for him by Corrie, as Matthias did one of his dances, jigging from foot to foot, and turning round and round. The last candle finally went out as Corrie was playing his cello. They listened in the darkness, in the firelight, until he had finished, and then the lights were put on and the presents opened.
CORRIE had just finished drying the last plate when Jo, who had finished his share of the washing-up a short while before him, reappeared in the kitchen.
“Come and listen!” he whispered, signalling to Corrie like a very small boy expressing urgency in an old black-and-white film.
Corrie moved out into Lilli’s hall, closing the kitchen door behind him, moving very quietly, caught by Jo’s mood. He sat down on the bottom stair, beside Jo, his feet next to some of Matthias’s scattered toys. There was a little woolly bear that he remembered Mum buying him in Bamburgh when he was seven. He picked it up and dangled it by one of its paws.
From upstairs they could hear Lilli telling Matthias the story of “The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids.” Matthias had come down, washed and dressed for bed, when they were in the middle of doing the dishes, to kiss them both good night. Jo sat with his knees pulled up against his chest, and his head leaning on its side on top of them, listening very intently.
“‘The seven little kids cried, “You must show us your paws first before you can come in, so that we will know that you really are our dear kind mother.” So the wolf put his flour-covered paws in through the window, and when the little kids saw that they were white, they believed that he really was their mother, and they opened the door. And in came the wolf! They were terrified, and…’”
Lilli sounded quite anxious. She always read stories well.
They listened a little longer.
“Corrie, do you remember when Mum used to read me that story?”
Jo’s face was turned away from Corrie, and he could not see his expression.
“Yes, I do.”
“That time when I had asthma really badly.”
“‘In tears,’” Lilli was saying upstairs,” ‘the mother goat called out the name of her youngest child, and a little voice said, “Mother, dear mother, I am hiding in the clockcase.’”
Jo pushed at the bear that Corrie was holding by its front paws, until it rocked backwards and forwards.
“When we were in the dining-room, before we opened the presents …” Jo, began. “When we were there, performing for Lilli, it reminded me of the Victorian Evening.”
“Yes.”
“That was the last time we saw Mum, and we didn’t realise.”
Jo’s hair was tousled from where it had rubbed against his knees.
On the Sunday night before Mum had flown to Rome, they had put on a Victorian Evening for Lilli, who was still suffering the after-effects of her stroke. Dad had driven Mum to the airport early the following morning, when he and Jo were still in bed.
Then, unexpectedly, Jo smiled.
“I’ll always remember that evening.”
Jo had drawn a programme for Lilli in a variety of elaborate Victorian type styles, and they furnished the window-bay of Lilli’s dining-room like the corner of a Victorian drawing-room, carrying through the scrapscreen from their living-room, moving the chaise-longue round, and putting Jo’s model theatre on a small tripod table and Cyril—deputising for an aspidistra—on a jardiniére from the sun lounge. Wearing Victorian clothes, they performed for an hour, with Lilli as their only audience. They acted part of Lady Audley’s Secret, with Jo, who rapidly assumed a woman’s costume, a memorable Alicia. Mum was Lady Audley. They read the death of Little Nell; extracts from a handbook of Victorian etiquette; “Casabianca,” “Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine,” among other poems—and sang several Victorian songs. The one Corrie remembered best was Mum and Jo singing “Won’t You Buy My Pretty Flowers?”
Upstairs, Lilli was reaching the end of the story.
“‘… the heavy stones made the wolf fall into the well, and he was drowned. When the seven little kids saw what had happened, they came running up to the well and shouted for joy, “The wicked wolf is dead! The wicked wolf is dead!” They danced around the well with their mother.’”
Jo pushed at the bear again, and it fell to the floor.
He was bending down to pick it up when the doorbell was rung, three times, in a signal they recognised.
“Sal.”
Sal had been Mum’s closest friend, and was a regular caller at both houses.
When Corrie opened the door, she staggered in, struggling with her umbrella and several parcels, as if she had been given a violent push in the back. She groaned, leaning back against the door, straining to close it.
“What a night!”
She dumped the parcels into Corrie’s arms, and bent down to kiss him on the cheek. He was still only five feet, three and one-half inches tall.
“Happy Christmas, gorgeous.”
She ran her hands through the tight curls of her newly permed hair, shaking out the wetness, and brushed at the front of her clothing. Then she peered closely at Corrie’s hair, assuming a scowl. She claimed to be deeply resentful of Corrie’s dark curly hair, a style she could only achieve by visits to the hairdresser’s.
“You’re not really letting poor little Jo sing out on the Green in this weather, are you, you rotten swine?”
“Did you call my name, belovèd?” asked Jo, standing up and striking a dramatic pose.
“Can it be he?” Sal said, clutching her hands to her heart as she turned to face him.
“My own!” he called. “I yearn to be with you! Clasp me to your bosom! Madden me with desire!”
Jo dived into Sal’s arms, and she hoisted him up into the air, his feet dangling, and pressed him against her.
“My angel!”
It was a performance they went through regularly, once in the middle of Norwich market-place when they had seen Sal there. A stall-holder had offered Jo a cauliflower to swap places with him.
“Can we tone down these scenes of unbridled passion?” Corrie asked.
“Heavens, we’re observed!” said Jo, his voice rather muffled.
Lilli was coming down the stairs.
“I like that new pendant you’ve got round your neck,” she said to Sal. It was the first time she had joined in one of their silly sessions.
Sal started laughing, and dropped Jo.
“He’s too heavy to wear for long,” Sal said. “You’ve been feeding him up again.”
“We’ve left you a few scraps,” Corrie said. “Mind that lump in the carpet.”
Sal stepped over Jo, and took Corrie’s arm as they went through into the dining-room.
“DO YOU happen to have the time on you?” Corrie asked later, as they walked through Lilli’s kitchen towards the sun lounge. He had been asking Jo the time every quarter of an hour or so since Jo had unwrapped his present. Corrie had given him a combined Christmas and birthday present, an expensive gift that he had been saving up for for some time: a Snoopy wrist-watch, with the dog’s front legs as the hands of the watch. Clutching a tennis-racket in one hand, Snoopy lugubriously swung his arms round and round the dial.
Exaggeratedly, Jo pulled back the cuff of his shirt and moved the wrist with the watch on up towards his face, twisting his wrist from side to side so that the watch faced towards him, then away.
“The time by my brand-new Snoopy watch is eight-ohseven precisely.”
“I say, what a spiffing watch! “
Corrie and Jo often spoke in the slang of old-fashioned school stories, assuming a painfully genteel and high-pitched accent, parodying their fictional roles.
“Santa brought it for me. I can tell the time now!”
“How super!”
The lights were on again on their side of the sun lounge, and in the kitchen. Baskerville was lying in his basket beside the desk with an expression of utter abandonment and desolation on his face. He lumbered to his feet as they came in, looking guardedly pleased.
Jo waved the parcel he had brought through from Lilli’s, and began to circle around Baskerville.
“I’ve got a prezzy for you!”
Corrie heard them chasing each other about the sun lounge as he went through into the kitchen, and then into the living-room, leaving the light off. He looked out through the front window towards the tree in the centre of the Green. No one was there yet.
There were bangs and slitherings from the back of the house, and Baskerville barked a couple of times. Corrie sat in the dark for a short time, and then went back through into the sun lounge. Baskerville was stretched out on the floor, chewing an enormous bone.
“I got him so excited that he wet himself,” Jo said, wiping at the tiles with a mop. “I’ve never had that effect on anyone before.”
Baskerville, grasping the bone on its end between his two front paws, shifted his position slightly, and the bone fell forward and hit him sharply on the nose. He looked startled, and scrabbled backwards.
“Baskervilles don’t like bones.”
Jo put the mop and bucket back in the corner, and then walked towards Corrie. He raised his eyebrows, pulling the corners of his mouth down in an expression of innocence. He had an extraordinarily mobile face, his features always shifting. When he talked, every particle of him took part in the performance. He could make Corrie giggle very easily sometimes, by just looking at him.
“I have my theories about you and Sal,” he said. “The whole thing became clear to me when you sneaked away into the dining-room together, leaving me lying on the floor.”
“And I thought we were being so discreet.”
“It’s obvious. She’s studying you to use in her next novel. In the interests of research, writers are sometimes compelled to undergo some very unpleasant experiences.”
“Do you think that my perversions…”
“Many and varied though they are…”
“…are advanced enough to interest her?”
Sal was quite well known as a writer of novels for young people—“New Adults,” they were called by the publisher—usually dealing frankly with complex emotional or sexual difficulties.
“You could work on them a bit,” Jo said. “Show a bit of imagination.” He looked at Baskerville. “Why not have a passionate affair with Baskerville? I don’t think she’s used that one yet.”
Baskerville, looking vaguely troubled, edged away and eyed Corrie with deep suspicion.
“He doesn’t look too keen on the idea.”
“Poor old Baskerville. The dignified butt of vulgar jesting.”
Jo began to stroke Baskerville’s head, and then continued speaking. “She is good, though, isn’t she?” he asked. “Her novels.”
“Stephen’s Child is.”
“Not as good as Small for His Age.”
“Just because it’s about you.”
“Judging by the title. Actually”—Jo’s voice became excruciatingly cultured—“I warmed to the subtle nuances of the adverbial clauses…”
“Well-educated infant!”
“…reminiscent, one feels, of the later period of Henry James.”
“One does indeed. One also thrills to the shimmering evocativeness of the setting.”
“And the daring audacity of the semicolons.”
“And the enormous bosoms.”
“And the enormous bosoms.” Jo giggled. “If it did have those, it might explain why people are so, rude about Sal’s books.”
“Never a week goes by without some headmaster having heart failure.”
“This book…This book…”—Jo began to keel over in slow motion, an expression of apoplectic horror on his face—“contains scenes of…masturbation!”
“Whatever that might be.”
“Whatever that might be.”
Corrie looked at his watch. “The carol service will be starting soon.”
Jo searched for his wellington boots under the table.
“I expect we’ll be the only people there. When they tell you that you’re singing a solo”—his voice became suddenly effete—“one does tend to imagine that one’s not completely solo, and that there will be people there to listen to one.”
“One does.”
“I’m the vicar in the empty church.”
“Verily.”
Jo stood up and put the wellington boots on.
“I’m going to sing whether anyone’s there or not.”
He looked at the wooden weather-house on the dresser. Both figures, the man and the woman, were inside the house, their backs turned on the outside world.
“I know just how you feel,” he said.
The telephone began to ring in the hall.
“I bet I know what that’s about,” Jo said, and went out.
He came back in a few minutes later, nodding his head.
“Cancelled? “
“Cancelled. I’ll just go and tell Lillie”
When he came back in, Jo pulled on his anorak and took down Dad’s umbrella.
“I said I was going to sing whether anyone was there or not.”
Corrie made a move towards the hallway, to go out to the Green from the front door, but Jo went through the sun lounge and opened the door into the garden at the back.
“Come on,” he said to Corrie. “Quick, before Baskerville makes a break for it.”
Corrie had to bend down, sharing the umbrella with his brother, bumping into him, standing on his heels, until he took it from him and held it over both of them. Jo led him out on to the path which ran alongside the end of the garden, along the top of the low cliff above the beach. He turned left towards Gun Hill, and some time later, wet and breathless, they were walking into St. Edmund’s churchyard.
He followed Jo, to stand in front of Mum’s grave.
Jo took a torch out of his anorak pocket, and they looked at the writing on the gravestone.
There was a bunch of copper-coloured chrysanthemums on the grave, their petals separated and scattered about.
“They didn’t last long in the rain,” Jo said.
Then, just as he had done in Lilli’s dining-room, he began to sing, naturally and unself-consciously, his head back, his hands thrust into his anorak pockets, his voice perfectly distinct above the sound of the rain on the umbrella.
“In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan;
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter,
Long ago…”
As Jo sang, Corrie felt again the mood he had entered looking at the Wind in the Willows calendar in the kitchen, and hearing the words of the nativity at Lilli’s: the sense of time passing, of things slipping away. It was the dying fall of “Long ago.”
While Jo was singing at Lilli’s, Corrie had thought of Mum’s funeral service, of sitting there with his whole attention concentrated on the daffodils in the vase on the table at the front of the church, shutting out everything else around him, thinking of Rousseau, falling waters, unpopulated greenness.
He was known to be a polite boy, respectful, well-mannered, shy. When people smiled at him, he smiled back, as though he were happy.
“He seems to be taking his mother’s death very well,” they said. “He’s been so mature about the whole thing. Wonderful with Jo and Matthias.”
How easily people can be fooled, he thought, not with pleasure, aware of depths within himself, little doors deep inside his head, doors that should never be opened.
Only Dad had seen him crying.
One night, two weeks after the funeral, he wanted to cry. He couldn’t stop himself any longer. It was late at night, and he was scared that Jo—in the adjoining room—might hear him. He knelt down in the bathroom, with the light off, his head pressed down on the edge of the bath. Cool air rose from the plug-hole. The smell of Pears’ soap. He watched a tear run down the side of the bath, like following raindrops down a window-pane, the rug pressing into his knees through his thin pyjamas, and then had to leave the bathroom because he was making a noise and Jo was just along the corridor.
He went downstairs, looking for somewhere to cry. Dad found him in the pantry, sitting on the bottom shelf beside the bread-bin, his feet resting on the potatoes in the vegetable rack, bent over, crying into a tea-towel smelling of lemon-juice.
Dad stood in the doorway, in his dressing-gown, looked at him for a moment, came inside, and they remained with their arms around each other for a long time in the darkness. He never said a word the whole time, and never said anything about it afterwards.
Dad hadn’t been fooled.
Corrie had always felt that he would have been friends with his Mum and Dad even if they hadn’t been related. Sometimes he called them by their first names, Pieter and Margaret. They had both been twenty-one when he was born. They were always ready to discuss his theories with him, and always said “Thank you” if he did something for them. When he was small—smaller—Dad used to give him rides on his shoulder, and in the weeks after Mum’s funeral they seemed to go back to those times they had together. Dad wrestled with him, lifted him up, threw him into the air. It was a bit embarrassing at his age, but it was nice. Dad gave him little jobs to do, and sat with him, talking, side by side, as he painted, did the garden, or sorted out the files in the office. One week they changed round all the furniture in the house, and Dad let him choose the new colours to repaint the downstairs rooms. He took them all out in the car every week, and they would talk about everything they’d seen. He left him alone when he wanted to be alone. Dad had talked with him about how much he missed Mum. When they were in London—the time they had gone to see Lilli—Dad had taken him and Jo to the National Gallery one morning, and pointed out to them the place where he and Mum had first met, in front of “A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal.” Corrie still smiled inwardly to himself whenever he saw a reproduction of this painting.
It was when he was outside alone that he felt the pressures of the outer world. He felt the weight of other people all around him. Every time he left the house, he had to prepare himself. A walk across the Green involved a need to greet and smile at half a dozen people. Because he was small and serious, adults often took it upon themselves to coax a smile out of him when he was alone with them. They all seemed to be taller than he was. He dreaded being alone with Mr. Arundel, the newsagent. He sometimes longed for a shop where he could go in and not be known, just buy a magazine or a packet of sweets, as he could in that shop in Lowestoft, without the need for the smile, the greeting, a few polite enquiries, the need to be good-natured, nice, a brave and well-brought-up boy.
Over coffee, in any one of a dozen houses in Southwold, he would have been a subject of interest and concern. Women he hardly knew, who passed him in the street and said “Hello, Corrie,” or “How’s your grandmother,” would be looking him up and down as they smiled and passed a few polite words. They would report back to each other in an interested, casual way, a subject for conversation, well meant, wanting to help, but they would report back. I saw Cornelius this morning. How is he now?
“He seems to be taking his mother’s death very well.”
“He’s been so mature about the whole thing.”
“Wonderful with Jo and Matthias…”
WHEN JO finished singing, they moved out towards Church Street to make their way back home.
Faintly, the voices had come out of the darkness and across the emptiness, high and clear in the cold air, shrill little voices singing of hope and steadfastness. The fir-tree is a symbol of faith. It is always green, in summer, and in winter also, when it is snowing. It is noble and alone. It comforts and strengthens us.