It was over 22 years since Carl had driven from Cambridge to get together, at last, with his Susie.
22 years isn’t so long as you grow older. You look at a pair of shoes, a shirt, a tie and think “I bought that 22 years ago” or you meet someone in the street and explain to your companion “I first met them over 22 years ago.”
22 years is not that long at all.
November 29th 1998 we were all gathered again in the study of Sandhey.
It would have been Alicia’s 78th birthday, her 57th wedding anniversary.
It was the day we all gathered to hear the reading of Max’s will.
The house hadn’t changed much in the intervening years. There was no building around, none of the new roads came anywhere near the old house. The sand dunes and rocks were protected, the golf course inviolable – nothing could ever happen to Sandhey or to Hilbre.
But we had all changed.
All the members of the old family were present. Charles, now 56 years old, stood with his hand resting on the back of Monika’s chair, still protective of her. Monika, nearly 70 years old now, looked the archetypical hausfrau, grey hair tied tightly in a bun behind her round head, apron wrapped around her now ample frame.
Carl, 6 years younger than his half brother, was just as tall and distinguished, his grey hair was longer, thicker and tied in a pony-tail at the nape of his tanned neck, his eyes were darker but there was a definite resemblance between them. Carl stood with his arm resting around the shoulders of Susannah, his collaborator and life long love – practically the same age, she still had her own dark wavy hair but her figure was filling out; ‘matronly’ was how I could best describe it.
They were very comfortable with each other and I believed that bringing them together was perhaps the best thing I had ever had a hand in. Their colleagues at the university and at the filming companies had given up asking them why they never married – they were obviously so happy with each other it didn’t matter. All the gossip columnists assumed they were.
Susannah’s children were there also. Josie, nearly 35; Jack, 31; Al, 30 and Bill, the youngest, 29.
There were also the men and women who had joined this family over the intervening years.
I began reading the codicil, explaining that the main reading would follow immediately after. It was dated just two months earlier.
I, Max Fischer, being of as much sound mind as I have been at any time in my life wish to make the following clear, to you all, you who have been a part of my life for so long.
I begin with a quotation Exodus chapter 34 Verse 7
Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin – and that will by no means clear the guilty – visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.”
I can see you all now, pondering that quotation.
Well Charles, Carl, Susannah you are the second generation. Arnold and Alicia, Maureen and Kathleen, they were the first to suffer from the actions of their parents.
Susannah, your children are the third generation. I know you and Carl have given them all the love they could possibly need to end the sequence. If God wills it the pain will end now.
For you all I would say ‘Do not judge them too harshly for things they could not know’. Much of this is not your responsibility. Do not blame yourselves.
I paused, looking around at all the serious faces. How many of them remembered Arnold, or Alicia. How many knew where Kathleen and Maureen fitted into their family’s history? Some of them would have had no idea what Max was talking about. I continued.
“The first and most important bequest for you all is this book of Ted’s. Read it carefully, learn from it. Learn to forgive your elders their mistakes for they make them either unwittingly or through weakness.
My second bequest is an explanation.
When Monika came into our lives if was not by accident, luck, chance, fate, whatever you want to call it but it was not an accident. I had spent a long time trying to find her.
When I was a student in Vienna, before the war, I occasionally visited my sister and brother-in-law on their farm. I loved my sister dearly but had little affection for the man she had married and felt sorry for their children. They had two sons and a daughter. The sons were considerably older than Rebecca and she had a lonely childhood.
On one occasion we were all having lunch around the big table by a roaring log fire. My brother-in-law and the boys were complaining about the land and how stony and steep it was and how dark it was throughout the winter when the sun never rose above the mountain on the other side of the valley.
So I had told them about a land that had no steep mountains or lakes, a land where they spoke a soft and gentle language, where people were free, where they got their food from the sea and the animals grazed the lush grass rather than being used to plough the land. This place was always sunny and the people were always happy. Rebecca had wanted me to draw a picture so I had drawn an outline of Brittany on the only piece of paper I could find in the kitchen of that farmhouse, an envelope, and had written some place names on it – “Brittany”, “Audierne”.
That envelope was used by my sister to hold Rebecca’s papers when they had escaped to France. She had kept it by her as they moved from place to place as the war took its course. On the day she died she called her daughter to her and gave it to her, telling her daughter never, ever, to lose it. As her mother lay dead beside her Monika spent hours sewing the envelope into the hem of her dress.
In the years she was alone, as the war drew to a close, she had survived; her movements unrecorded, her actions unnoticed by anyone in the world. She was as near to invisible as she could be – a homeless, stateless individual in a chaotic world.
When she was particularly lonely and frightened she would remember her mother’s envelope and take comfort that it was still sewn inside her dress. It was a ritual for her that whenever she obtained new clothes she would cut the crumpled and dirty envelope out of the old and sew it into the new. Every time she would look at the familiar lines and squiggles, they always made her feel safe even though she had no idea what they represented.
In the spring of 1947 she had fallen in with an English soldier. He gave her a new dress. As she was transferring her envelope to the new hem he tried to take it from her but she wouldn’t let him see it. When he eventually persuaded her to show it to him he stared at the faded and barely visible shapes, holding the envelope one way then another. He was a kind man, with daughters her age of his own back in Newcastle. He told her he was not going to steal her envelope, and asked if she wanted to know what the markings meant.
“It’s a map.” He told her. “I can just make it out. It’s a map of Brittany – that’s a part of France about a hundred miles from here. There’s a town marked on it. It looks like Audierne’.”
So he had taken her there.
I had always wished that I, instead of her Father, had been the one responsible for her safety. I like to flatter myself that I would have made a better job of it – but I could not have improved on the person she became.
Monika, I have loved you as a father might for all your life. Your real name is Rebecca Rebmann. Your mother was my sister. You are my dear niece – but I could never tell you for all the memories I knew it would bring up to mention it. As we grew older together I knew your knowing our relationship could not make us any fonder of each other. So I let it be.
You mother’s grandfather, our father’s father, was a jew. It was a close enough relationship in those times for it to be too dangerous to stay in Austria. Your father hated the connection, your brothers hated you because of it that is why they treated you as they did. They left for the army the day you and your mother left Austria as refugees.
So you see, you are the one person who has broken the sequence. You were the second generation and you did not pass the evil of hatred on to a third. You have no sin to pass on. Your love for every one of the people in this room has gone beyond family, gone beyond what ‘should be’ to what ‘can be’. Monika, we have all learned from you.
Now, my dear children, Ted will read the formal part of my Will and the disposition of my assets.
I hope you will each understand why I have done what I have done. To help you understand read the words I have asked him to write.
They will explain everything.
This is the first chapter of
Walking Alone
Book 2 of the Iniquities Trilogy, which will be published shortly.
The three figures presented a clear illustration of the downside of international travel.
They must have been very tired as the middle-aged woman, although somewhat dishevelled, looked far too smart to be used to sitting on kerbstones with her feet in the gutter. She yawned as she ran her fingers through her hair.
“When I do that I get told off,” her daughter complained, continuing in a voice mimicking her mother “You should always put your hand in front of your mouth when you yawn.” She was only silenced by a look from her father.
It was lunchtime but Speke Airport had a middle-of-the-night feel about it as no more flights were expected to arrive or leave for some hours. They had had every opportunity to know this as they had had only the arrivals and departures screen to entertain them as they had waited for their bags to arrive on the carousel. What other passengers there had been on the flight up from Heathrow had had only hand luggage and had all passed through the hall before any luggage had appeared.
Their ‘middle-of-the-night’ feeling was emphasised when they finally wheeled their luggage trolleys outside to be met by an empty road with no sign of a cab waiting for a fare.
They had stood for a while by the Taxi sign before deciding it was to be a long wait and making themselves a bit more comfortable. Holly perched herself on top of the cases on the trolley, Mary sat on the kerb, her legs stretched out in front of her and Matt tried to put as much of his weight on the handle of the trolley as he could without tipping it, and Holly, onto the pavement.
“At home there’d be hundreds of cabs.” The young girl wound her long hair around her fingers and sucked on it.
“Don’t do that! How many times do I have to tell you?”
“A cab will be along soon just hang on in there a few minutes more. We’re on the last leg.” Matt tried to sound encouraging but there was no sign of any vehicle let alone a taxi cab.
“At least it’s not raining.” Mary had been expecting it always to be raining in England, even in July, but the sun was shining and it was pleasantly warm.
“What time is it?” asked Holly “I’m ready for a shower, though I bet they don’t have such things as showers over here.”
“Of course they’ll have showers.” Matt sounded rather more confident than he felt. Most of the hotels he had stayed at in Europe hadn’t had showers. He hoped that the hotel he had been assured was the best in Liverpool would live up to its reputation. “You’ll be very comfortable here, Sir,” the reservations clerk had said “we have lots of Americans staying here. We’re used to your special requirements.” Whatever that means Matt had thought at the time. Still a shower shouldn’t be too much to ask.
Holly was not only tired, she was sulking because she didn’t want to be in England.
She hadn’t wanted to leave her friends and her school to come to England for God knows how long – a few weeks, a few months, years, forever? Especially Paul. She hadn’t wanted to leave him when she’d only just managed to get him to notice her. She did wonder if it was her leaving for England that had got him interested in the end. She was determined to write him every week, as she had promised. She was pretty sure he would write to her.
“I bet they only have bathtubs. I hate them. Why did we have to come?”
“You’ll be OK tomorrow, right now you’re just tired. You always act way below your age when you’re tired.” Her father had a way of putting her down that she could never argue against.
There was no way either of her parents would have answered Holly’s question and explain why Matt had uprooted his family.
The simple answer was that her mother had been persuaded to leave her job in Boston to take up a visiting lecturing job at Liverpool University in their Department of Statistics and Computational Maths. But it was more complicated than that. It had all been Matt’s idea and Mary felt he had never really explained why he had wanted to uproot the family and move to England.
It took over half an hour before a cab finally appeared. It was small and an undistinguished shade of pale green but at least they could finally be on their way into the city. The driver got out speaking loudly and quickly in what sounded to them all like a foreign language.
“I think he’s telling us not to worry – he’ll fit us and all our luggage in the cab.” translated Matthew. “I’m not so sure.”
As they drove towards the city the driver kept saying something what was probably an apology but none of the occupants understood what he was saying.
“Can you speak slow?” Matthew had decided we must try to communicate with the driver.
“Sorry wack! Keep forgerring you don’ speak English you know warr I mean like you being yanks an all you know warr I mean like!”
“Is that English? I’ll never understand anyone.” Holly moaned and slouched against the door.
Matthew and Mary settled back as best they could amongst the bags on the back seat.
“He’s driving so fast.”
Mary was used to more gentle speeds and the way they were being driven was almost the last straw. She felt like she would soon break down and cry. “Oh Matt are we doing the right thing?”
“It’ll be fine Mary, it’ll all work out OK you’ll see.”
“Sure, it’ll all be OK.” She didn’t sound convinced.
A few minutes later she spoke again, hoping that Holly couldn’t hear her with the noise of the car and the driver who was still talking to no one in particular. “I’d thought that England would just be like home only wetter and, just, somehow, greyer. I thought the people would be just like us, and the language just the same. But it’s all so different.”
Holly had regained some of her energy when they arrived at the hotel.
She ran up the steps, turned round and looked out at the crowded city streets, her tiredness and bad mood forgotten. “Wow. Liverpool. This is so neat!”
“Tomorrow, Holly, you can explore tomorrow. Meanwhile take this and stay with the bags and wait while I check in.” Matt, having got his family across the Atlantic, had just about had enough. He was ready for a shower and bed.
As they walked across the foyer Holly walked straight into a good-looking young man.
She noticed him because he was exactly as he had hoped English men would be, with long dark brown hair tied in a pony tail and wearing a black polo necked sweater with a brown leather jacket and denim jeans.
“I beg your pardon.”
“Oh no, Holly got in your way – it’s not your fault at all.” Mary knew she was in England when people apologised for things that were not their fault.
“Mom! He walked into me. It wasn’t my fault. But he was kinda smart don’t you think?”
The young man didn’t hear her as he continued talking animatedly to his older companion, engrossed in their own business as they left through the revolving door.
As Matt had a bath Mary unpacked, bemoaning the lack of drawer and cupboard space. She sat down on the side of the bed, hit by the realisation that there was no going back, for a year at least they were stuck here, in Liverpool. She repeated to herself the question her daughter had asked earlier “Did we have to come?”