Having paid for basic redecoration and repairs, the Bankses’ generosity understandably petered out after buying the young couple a bed, sofa, table and chairs. Edward had a few sticks of furniture picked up in junk shops and Rexbridge market over the years, but there was certainly not enough to furnish every room. Much of what they discovered under Dr Pertwee’s dustsheets was mouldy beyond redemption. One of the new things they learned on moving in together, however, was their shared loathing of the clutter that had filled the houses of their childhoods. So, to Mrs Banks’s horror, they happily emphasised the strange house’s emptiness. There was one room with nothing in it but a bed, the next just contained a wardrobe, while another had nothing in it at all. Edward claimed he sometimes lay on its floor ‘to think’. ‘All it needs is a straitjacket,’ Mrs Banks quipped.
The only room Edward avoided was the sad little bedroom with the barred window and iron bedstead. He said nothing of this to Sally, but he could not forget the strange sensation that had overcome him the first time he had entered it. The room spoke to him of Miriam. It unsettled him to wake in the night and remember that it waited for him through a low door only feet away from his marriage bed, a small, chill cell of doubt.
When they found that Edward’s piano would not fit through any of the internal doors, they emptied the high-domed central hall to leave it there in glorious isolation with only a small sofa and standard lamp for company. The furnishing was completed with mirrors and abundant sunlight.
‘I love the light,’ Sally exclaimed on one of their first mornings, walking from room to room in her dressing gown. ‘I love the way it bounces around here with nothing to get in its way. It gets everywhere!’
After the torture of spending the first weeks of wedlock in the Bankses’ cottage – which was almost worse than not being married at all, they were afforded so little privacy – there were pleasures in the simple fact of their sharing an isolated house. There were obvious ones, touched on during their honeymoon, like uninterrupted, unlimited intimacy and being able to walk around stark naked. Then there were other, less obvious pleasures, ones unlooked-for. They found themselves together at times of day – breakfast, teatime, the dead of night – that they had rarely shared. Edward found Sally’s culinary skills stretched no further than grilling chops and scrambling eggs but, for a man whose life had always been run by women of the nurturing-nourishing kind, this was oddly reassuring. It confirmed Sally’s otherness from his family in his mind. After a few brave disasters in the kitchen, she abandoned the struggle and they started to learn together, working their way, recipe by recipe, through a cookery book given as a wedding present. That this meant starting on soups and progressing through eggs and cheese to poultry via fish was no bad thing since the earlier recipes were also among the cheapest in the book to make.
In their previous brief weekends away, even during their honeymoon, Sally had managed to keep a part of herself undisclosed out of a sweetly old-fashioned desire, Edward assumed, to sustain some romantic illusion of feminine perfection. But now that they shared the same antiquated bathroom day in, day out, the illusion was crumbling. He grew to know her smells – many of which, since they now shared a diet, were amusingly identical to his. He encountered and recorded as precious shards of knowledge, her favourite soap, her shampoo, the space above the bathroom cabinet where she hid a razor. He teased her delightedly when, in a fit of ostensible altruism, she bought him a shaving brush and foaming stick to change his old, monastic habit of using a meagre lather of Lifebuoy. ‘It’s what Dad uses,’ she explained.
On her birthday he went shopping in Rexbridge, sniffing at countless scent bottles until his head was spinning and his nostrils raw. At last he frittered precious savings on a bottle of something floral and French which delighted her. When he related the difficulty of his quest and confessed that she had been bewitching him with mere vanilla essence at a fraction of the price, she seemed utterly charmed. However delicious, the new scent was perplexing on her skin, as if it were not entirely her lying beside him, only a near-perfect, over-ambitious replica.
‘You sniff me like a dog!’ she protested, playfully cuffing the side of his head as he ran his inquisitive nose across the side of her neck. But she divined what was disturbing him and began to wear vanilla again when she was alone with him, happy to save the French concoction for her sorties alone into the world outside, stepping into the alien aroma as into a protective shell.
Sally had tracked down the local GP and found that he had an invalid wife and badly needed someone to take over from him on a regular basis, but had so far been unable to persuade anyone to work somewhere so remote and for so little pay. He was a kind, careworn man, tormented by his fractious spouse, and initially Sally felt he would be taking bread from his own mouth to feed her. She hardened her heart, however, reminding herself that she now had a husband to support, and did not let on that the pay would be riches after her scant salary at the hospital.
In the evenings, they worked in the garden by the last of the sunlight. The fenland sky hung huge around them, with few interruptions – no hills or trees and no tall buildings save the tower of St Oswald’s down the road. Town skies were a mere overhead strip compared with this dome which stretched to the far horizon. Even after the sun had set, the sky retained a glow strong enough to light the end of their labours. Neither had gardened before. Edward’s childhood home in Tübingen had been inside a great, dark mansion block without so much as a balcony. For flowers and greenery, the family had taken walks in the public parks around the castle and ramparts, where all but the daisies were tidied tantalisingly out of reach. Sally’s gardening experience stopped at growing mustard and cress seeds in a hollowed-out potato half. The space behind the Bankses’ house had always been consecrated to precious vegetables, coaxed from the soil by Ida Totteridge and thus forbidden territory to her. Edward found a stash of garden tools in the heterogeneous disorder beneath the kitchen staircase. He oiled the secateurs and took them and a saw to be sharpened by the knife grinder in Rexbridge market. Then he and Sally set to work taming the small jungle that surrounded them. Roses that had become whippy trees were reduced to unpromising stumps. The Virginia creeper and jasmine that had engulfed one side of the house were hacked back from windows and carefully teased away from the roof and gutters. The ivy on the other side was killed off altogether, as it seemed to be damaging the masonry. The work was slow. Defeated by hunger and encroaching darkness, they retired each evening, bloody, mud-smeared, their skin burning and itchy with drying plant juices, and when they began again it seemed as though the previous day’s work had been undone by foliage creeping in the night.
Gradually old forms re-emerged. A stagnant pond with a broken statue at its centre. Rope-shaped terracotta edging surrounded what was now recognisable as a rose garden. A sundial. There was a rosemary bush tall as Sally’s shoulders and a colony of chives that had become a miniature lawn. Two curls of wrought iron were all that remained of a long-rotten garden bench. Edward spent a short-tempered day teasing out the old bolts and fitting the frames with new wood. They placed the bench down by the river and when one of her new mothers gave her a big bag of daffodil bulbs in gratitude for an easy delivery, Sally waded across the water to plant them in the bank on the other side. Edward took an old scythe to the long grass and, watching his rhythmic motion, his trousers streaked with grass juices and his shirt plastered to the sweating skin beneath, Sally ached for love of him and suddenly realised how badly she wanted to bear his child. She laughed at herself and later turned the moment to high comedy in one of her regular bulletins to Dr Pertwee.
‘We’re quite the new Adam and Eve,’ she wrote. ‘It’s a good thing I have A Husband’s Love to keep my feet firmly on the ground amid all this honest toil and newly-turned earth.’
Left alone in the cavernous hall after Sally drove off to work in the mornings, Edward started to make preliminary sketches for an opera. It had begun life as a symphony. Great blocks of sound in his head, which he had to scribble down in a rush before they evaporated. Then he found that strings, wind and brass were not enough. He wanted voices. He wrote pages of wordless singing – a rhapsodic soprano and a chorus – well before he came up with a suitable subject for the opera. He wracked his brains but it seemed that every story – King David, the Fall of Troy, Mary Queen of Scots – had been done before. Finally, he put it to Thomas, who came over for lunch one day when Sally was at the surgery.
‘A subject for a libretto. A new subject. That’s hard.’ Thomas pondered. He walked over to the kitchen window, chewing on a lamb chop he had taken between finger and thumb. He turned, leaning against the old belfast sink, and stared at Edward for a moment. His eyes twinkled.
‘Job,’ he said. ‘Do the Book of Job.’
‘Vaughan Williams.’
‘That’s just a ballet.’
‘No soprano role,’ Edward pointed out.
‘He had daughters, a wife – his sons were probably married. Besides, the gender of the comforters isn’t specified! Lucifer too, perhaps? The Shining One as coloratura soprano – or perhaps that would be a little much …’
All that afternoon, while Sally was visiting children with measles and mothers with morning sickness, Edward sat, hunched over her school Bible at the kitchen table, reading the Book of Job. He scarcely knew Sunday school stories, let alone the more obscure passages. But as he read, he understood Thomas’s faintly mischievous smile as he made his suggestion. The tale of the man stripped of happiness, caught in a torrent of distresses, who yet praises God, could not have been more ironically apposite for a post-war German Jew. Sadly it could not have been less operatic either. Something in the tale held him however. Perhaps it was the shock of finding words familiar from The Messiah – ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ – nestling like a jewel at the story’s leprous centre.
He would begin his task by expanding the opening sentences, to establish Job’s massive wealth, glory and earthly happiness. He decided to focus on the daughters, whom the text specifically named as Jemima, Keziah and Kerenhappuch, while leaving the sons as anonymous as the slaughtered sheep and servants. The opera could open with Job a kind of Lear, lapping up the adoration of the three girls – a convenient soprano-mezzo-contralto trio, with Kerenhappuch inevitably the contralto. It would end with a subtly altered reprise, but now the resurrected three would be giving their praise to their heavenly father, not their earthly one. It would become both cautionary tale and consolation.
Thomas’s intention in his suggestion might also have been therapeutic. Reading and re-reading the text over the weeks that followed unlocked memories of Edward’s boyhood, happy memories, of his mother, grandmother and sister. Suddenly his dream life grew crowded as a family album.
Aware how harshly secretive he must have appeared in the past, he found himself telling Sally everything there was to know about his childhood. Encouraged by her interest, he allowed himself to feel Jewish for the first time since he left his homeland. He allowed himself to be German. Sally found frames for some battered photographs he had of his parents and Miriam and he arranged them on the piano lid like so many witnesses to his new pleasures. He even taught her some Yiddish words and phrases and laughed at her Saxon difficulty in mastering them. With this final laying of the ghosts that had troubled him, it seemed that the seal was being set on his unalloyed happiness.